Email Isn’t the Thing We’re Bad At | Hacker News Reader

Email Isn’t the Thing We’re Bad At

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203 pointsingve117 comments

The reason nothing has replaced email yet, even tough it's an old and clonky protocol is because it's an open standard and people don't make standards any more. Today you make services (most often based on HTTP because it's a protocol any 20yr old junior programmer can handle) that are locked in, harvesting has much data about it's users as possible desperately hoping that it could monetize on this data one day.

And don't forget when the company can't monetize data well enough (because the only people making money on this garbage are the ones with 20% of the global populace) the company goes away, if you're lucky gives you a way to archive your whatever or fetch it via an API, after which you either are locked into the Shiny And New service that everybody likes because it's shiny and new, or have a massive XML/text/zip file full of garbage you know you're never going to take the time to sort, and rinse and repeat.

I wish this was a newsgroup.

alt.ynews would be nice

I believe the biggest reason for HTTP is that firewalls let it through.

Related to that point: the fact that email still provides a relatively low overhead method of reading and sending communications, and the end-user is somewhat in control of the user experience because they can choose what email client(s) they want to use.

Nearly every other 'email killer' gets both of these things badly wrong.

I actually wish e-mail were used more.

I want my relatives, my spouse, my friends to use e-mail.

I'm not quite sure how to convince them, though. It generally feels like they'd rather use Facebook or WhatsApp or whatever's in fashion at the moment.

Any tips? Do I just have to sign up to all of the different chat apps and write bots to forward them to me or something?

My family does a great job of using mail, as well as some friends, but others are annoyingly stuck in the land of Facebook messaging. I get that it's convenient, because I have more friends on Facebook than I do friends' email addresses, but I don't like that it's such a locked-down medium. I don't even notifications on my phone about Facebook messages because I uninstalled the apps after the battery issues. Email is a way better way to reach me quickly.

The single biggest thing about getting a smartphone to me was how much more useful it made email. At the time I was still using email constantly, but a lot of other people weren't. Having easy access to it on your phone, with notifications, rather than as something you have to remember to log in to all the time and check for updates, really opened it up.

Didn't facebook used to offer email?

EDIT: http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/24/5443454/facebook-retires-i...

Same. If there was an app that could send FB messages, whatsapp, and SMS to my email where I could respond from, I'd pay for it.

To be honest for me it's all a bit odd. It's like, I just don't fit into socializing in $CURRENT_YEAR with ordinary people. I feel a bit like an old fuddy.

WhatsApp has some weird thing whereby I need a smartphone and a telephone number and shit.

Facebook - let's not even go there.

My ideal communication feels like call > e-mail. SMS possibly as an ephemeral 'i'm outside the museum, i can see you from here' type thing.

Basically anything else I just don't really get (for one on one). IM is so distracting that unless I'm doing something mindless like playing a video game, I'd be better off in a call.

IM's good if you're at your desk shooting the shit with your friends/coworkers. Unlike the phone, it's asynchronous, so you can reply when it's convenient. You also don't have to worry about eavesdroppers. It's better than SMS because a longer SMS ends up getting split over multiple messages and they can sometimes get stuck in the ether for a while, and you can use your keyboard instead of holding your phone and making it obvious that you're not working. It's better than e-mail because you don't want a gazillion one-sentence emails of BS going back and forth.

I generally keep email for "official" business or more thought-out messages to friends, Hangouts for more banal chit-chat, and I can always go back and search that if it turns into a more important conversation. SMS for the few weirdos who don't do Hangouts, and then voice is an absolute last resort. Real-time telecommunication just demands too much immediate attention- whomever I'm speaking to will say something that leads my mind to wander off and I'll miss a sentence or two, and then I can't go back and re-read what was said. Hate, hate, HATE calls!

I mean certainly you could build that bidirectionally with their APIs, except for the SMS, though I suppose you could with a Twilio number or something. But the flow is so different. I might exchange twenty one-line messages with someone over Facebook. That would be pure hell in email.

Even though I prefer email to all other protocols, that would be a great way to kill my inbox. It seems a but counter intuitive, but having so many chat/communication standards acts as a way to organize all my messaging activity. Email is formal, SMS is slightly less formal but more direct, Whatsapp is completely informal but more convenient for casual conversations than SMS, and though I don't use Facebook Messenger I'm sure it has a spot somewhere in there.

The only solution I can see is making sure you have their email addresses and reach out to them with meaningful emails. They all still have email addresses.

One of my favourite things is reconnecting with people after time apart. With tools like Facebook, this rarely happens any more. It feels weird not to see someone for a while, then you reconnect in person and know too much about what's gone on in their lives. It takes the intimacy out of the person-to-person conversation of catching-up.

I'd rather get the yearly email update from old friends, than to track their lives voyeuristically through the web.

> It takes the intimacy out of the person-to-person conversation of catching-up.

I'm glad I'm not the only one that feels this way.

I disagree. It gives you stuff to talk about when you meet. Ask details of things you saw in a post or a picture etc etc.

Besides, there are so so so many aspects of people's lives they do NOT post or tweet about. My "reconnect after a long time" chats are usually spent exploring those

> I'd rather get the yearly email update from old friends, than to track their lives voyeuristically through the web.

This is a good idea. I should starting writing something like this, as I know my older family members would enjoy it.

>I'm not quite sure how to convince them, though.

By sending them email?

Delete your Facebook. There are a more benefits than being able to email; you'll stop pretending to be friends with those kids from high school, don't see your ex's new life, and you can get drunk with your friends without your aunt knowing.

This exactly. I deleted my Facebook years ago, and everyone about whom I care communicates with me via iMessage (short), Skype, and email--which in my view are the simple, not too problematic originals. My family, spread across two coasts of the US, and Eastern Europe actually has email threads going in which we keep up with each other, share findings, and make fun of one another.

I would do this but sadly I was dumb enough to use it with OAuth in numerous places

Why is this a problem?

It means deleting your Facebook account will also prevent you logging into those other services. I had to delete a Spotify account and start over after I initially signed up via a Facebook login.

(I should note that the Spotify staff were amazingly helpful and actually migrated me over to an email-login account when asked.)

That's because you used FB to register instead of creating your own account. I suggest doing that in future, and use a password manager.

At one point Spotify were requiring users to link their accounts to Facebook. http://www.whathifi.com/news/spotify-no-longer-requires-face...

Ouch. Big reason not to register.

SyneRyder's post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11569891) was specifically adduced to demonstrate the dangers of logging in with Facebook, and mentions that doing so was an accident, so explaining the dangers and suggesting that he or she not do it again seems patronising.

Maybe this isn't a great solution, and I haven't tried it, but you could defriend everyone, and set your privacy settings so nobody can see or find you. For most purposes, you'd cease to exist on Facebook.

> and you can get drunk with your friends without your aunt knowing.

Unless your friends are on facebook. If that's the case then there's some second-hand facebooking/instagramming that you have to be aware of.

Real friends don't care if you are on Facebook or not.

I think he meant that evidence of your drinking might still show up on Facebook, especially if those photos are tagged with your name.

I may be wrong, but unless your aunt was then browsing your friends posts / was following those friends, she wouldn't see those photos.

True but, all the same, drunk/stoned people equipped with phones are very dangerous for your privacy. They are actually dangerous whether they are drunk or sober, especially if they are clueless about Facebook's privacy settings.

Mine are set in such a way that you can't add me as a friend if you're not already friends with a friend of mine. If we then are friends, you can't post anything to my wall nor can you tag me in any way without my consent. Granted, the picture will still be there (and possibly visible by anyone if it was posted by one such clueless individual), but then again deleting your Facebook account won't magically erase all the pictures you appear in either.

The actual problem is that any idiot has a smartphone and a Facebook or Instagram account. And they take pictures. And post them.

There doesn't need to be any aunt following your friends. A cousin is more than enough. And there are countries where related families tend to be scattered over a relatively small area, so having friends in common between you and your relatives is but a rare occurrence.

I believe that if you are tagged in the photo (which resolves to a link to your account) then it is possible for that photo to show up in any of your Facebook friends' feeds (if your sharing permissions are too broad). However, once you delete your account I'm not sure if Facebook scrubs all those linkages.

I know, I'm not on facebook and my friends either text or call to let me know about anything. @infinite8s explained what I meant.

I did that for three years and regret it. I realize now that I should have just shaped my use to fit my needs: unfriend or unfollow people I don't care to follow, write more messages rather than scrolling through the newsfeed, and join events and groups more deliberately.

Now I actually use it to keep in touch with people I care about, rather than just pretend that's what I'm doing.

I missed out on some things during my three years with Facebook off, and although I learned so much from having done it, I wouldn't do it again.

What do you mean "pretending"?

I unfollow or block assholes, but there is a whole world of folks I keep up with ranging from distant relatives to musicians I played a one off gig with.

These folks are about as good friends as the people at local businesses I know well enough to say "hi, how's your daughter" or whatever.

I don't have to be radically intimate with people in order to count them among my friends. It's a scale, and it comes and goes based on how we interact. But it's not pretense.

I wish every product developer thought Email-First.

The best strategy I've found is to simply be unavailable on those other platforms. Regularly initiate conversations on email, and they will get used to it.

Here's something that has been in the back of my mind for some time. It's not 100% reliable, nor is it adequately tested but it's a thought:

When I start a conversation, when I am the initiator in the exchange, I use my favourite mean of communication (email or whatever). When I receive a message I go along the sender's favourite mean of communication.

It depends on the practical need for synchronicity. When async is ok (intervals of hours or days betweeen responses are acceptable), even a small group conversation can be migrated from FB to email, with a short explanation.

It is also possible to receive a message on one channel, while replying on another channel.

Well, my preferred form of communication is e-mail and thus I tend to start conversations via e-mail (if an instant response isn't required). Guess what? Some people started replying to my e-mails via Facebook! I am somewhat okay with using FB as "the new sms" but I don't want to store my personal correspondence on their servers.

Same thing as IRC. Recommend clients that don't suck for the platforms they are using, and that are adapted to their technical level.

IRCCloud or – if you set it up for them – Quassel for IRC then?

I’m sure for email we could find an equivalent solution.

I set my dad (in his 70s) up on Gmail and he uses that to contact me, my uncle and a few friends. For the first year he used "Home" as a subject and put the time he sent the email in the body, but he seems to have understood that isn't needed now.

I think what helped adoption was that both myself and my uncle were living in different countries, so email was the easiest way to reach us given the timezones. He also found out how to email photos, so he likes sharing what he has been up to and seeing what we are doing.

Emails are basically the same as letters, which he is was used to writing, so it was fairly easy for him to understand that. I haven't tried introducing him to a chat app, but I don't think he would be able to get it so easily.

It's because of the UX. Email has traditionally been letter sized messages, each message takes up your entire screen or some other large fraction. Email for most people is HTML flyers sent to them by companies so it would be difficult to render a message and letter based UX with the same standard. The amount of friction to send a message is pretty high too.

Also because of the design of email, the speed of interaction is pretty slow compared to a message style UX. The creators of these apps favor low bandwidth network communications, so sending the word 'ok' to someone doesn't involve a large header, the rest of the conversation quoted in the same email. It's just the word 'ok' and maybe a conversation/user id.

>It generally feels like they'd rather use Facebook or WhatsApp

My family and friends are 100% SMS, which sucks if you like me have a distaste for phones (not just smartphones, just phones in general). Emails is much more in line with my way of communicating.

Of cause at work it's often illustrated that other people aren't to skilled in writing emails. More often than not I resort to guessing the message hidden within the broken sentences, poor spelling and screenshots of things I know nothing about.

Aren't there SMS<->email services?

I believe with facebook at least, you can send and receive messages with email.

I never mark email as read, nor do I move it out of my inbox. I have something like 800k unread emails in my inbox.

However, I don't need to 'declare email bankruptcy' nor do I need to clear out my inbox.. I just don't pay any attention to the read or unread status. My inbox IS my archive.

My system is this:

When I check my email, I make sure I mark the most recent email as read. Then, I look back until I find the next email marked as read. The emails between those two are the ones that are unseen.

I do a quick glance at the emails in between. If they look important, I read them. If they are important but I don't want to deal with it now, I 'star' it in gmail. If it isn't important, I just don't do anything.

I don't quite get the need to have an empty inbox or to read every email.

> If they are important but I don't want to deal with it now, I 'star' it in gmail.

Does this eventually make your starred emails like everyone else's unread? Do you have to "declare starred email bankruptcy"?

> I make sure I mark the most recent email as read. Then, I look back until I find the next email marked as read.

I don't have to do any of this or have a special system. I just read my email. If an email is unread, it's unread. If it's in the inbox, it hasn't been dealt with yet.

That's where the "need" comes from: it's the simplest way of achieving exactly the same result you achieve with your system.

I use basically the system described above, because I have tons of emails that I never intend to read (e.g., from mailing lists). The system of leaving them all in my inbox is simpler than having to explicitly archive them all.

If I were you I would use a filter to auto-archive all those mailing-lists you don't intend to read.

You're just talking semantics here - you have a different definition of "read email" and "archive" than the author. The article is just explaining how to process all of your email and take action on the relevant portion, which you seem to have under control just fine.

So the Inbox Zero (and Getting Things Done, which is basically the overlying philosophy) is basically for people for which the status quo doesn't work. If you're able to manage your data without an empty inbox, that's great!

But if you're "suffering" from your e-mail, Inbox Zero is great for a couple reasons:

- The rules are simple. Read it, then archive, reply immediately, or archive it but put "reply to this email" in your todo list.

- The success state is simple. Is your inbox non-empty? Empty it. Is it empty? Go away.

- It's about aggressive honesty. You won't reply to your aunt's email from 2 weeks ago. Replying with a one-sentence thing in 30 seconds is OK.

- It fits with "email bankruptcy". Honesty and feeling of dread means you should really just empty your inbox.

the core thing is that it removes decision-making from the process of checking your email. For people who struggle with organisation, this is a bit of a godsend. Sure, you still have to reply, but for a lot of people following the Inbox Zero rules you'll end up feeling a lot less totally useless stress from staring at your inbox (even if it's just somewhere else).

It's sensible advice for people who don't have a working system. If you have a working system, you should totally use that though, it probably works better for you. Though maybe your system isn't working as well as you might hope, so it's always good to experiment.

I feel like Inbox Zero is mostly for people that receive massive quantities of email that they also have to act on.

For people like me who mostly receive updates and notifications via email and only occasionally receive actionable content through email it doesn't make sense to have some sort of superset of methods on top of what my email software already provides.

I read the stuff that's interesting to me, I pin things I need to take care of later or remember (I use Inbox), I reply to things that need replying to which typically only happens a handful of times per week, and that's that.

If I ever get to the point where I am pinning several emails per week and find that I have to act or reply on more than the handful of emails per week that I already do I will consider a method for staying on top of my inbox but until then the built-in tools already do it well enough for me.

Also I would start by looking into the tools themselves to see how they could help me, rather than inventing a set of rules for how to use my inbox. Filtering, bundles in Inbox, etc.

But hey, to each their own. I would get stressed out with an Inbox Zero mindset.

That's a good point. If E-mail is your RSS, then this might not work for you.

Part of it is definitely feeding into an urge to be an e-mail completionist (for me this has ended up with me unsubscribing from a _lot_ of email notifications), so there is an argument that IZ feeding into the obsessive parts of ourselves.

The whole "Getting Things Done" mindset is that you have to make a call on everything, so you have to act on it. Like if you get a promo coupon, you need to set some time to go browse the website if you're thinking of using it. Nothing takes 0 seconds, right?

It's the sort of stuff to apply if you feel like your time is being sapped away an you're not sure why. As one of those people, it's helped me a lot, so I recommend it because I know others out there are like that... but no point putting a Band-Aid where there's no problem right?

I'm like this, without the extra added steps. I have 2500 unread emails in my inbox, I skim over what's new in the inbox and read what I want that's it, the important thing is search.

I've found this is applying to almost everything I do for a while now. Started with gmail, its google after all I can just search.

I don't "organise" my inbox, if I need to find an email I'll search for it.

I have over 70 tabs open in chrome, if I need to find a tab I search for it. Using vimium I press shift+t and just search for the tab, if it doesn't find the tab it opens a google search for it.

I don't ever organise my files/downloads folder, If I need to find a file I command+space and write open yellow-subm. Using Alfred

I don't bother with folder structure organisation, every project is a folder under ~/src folder, if I need to go to the server project I write on the terminal `z serv`, and it cd's into the folder. Using z[0].

I don't bother with which buffers are open in vim, if I need to see the file drink something controller file I press <leader>t and write drikcontrol. Using command-t

If I want to put the computer to sleep I press command+space and write sleep. Again Alfred

I think what changed for me is I don't really care about the structure/organisation I care about getting the thing I want. I either want to find something (search), or do something (command).

I guess the important thing is the organisation is implicit on the name/contents of the thing I'm looking for.

The only problem that rises from this is if a co-worker asks where a code file is I usually don't know, but then I solve that by <leader>t name-of-file and check the path.

[0] https://github.com/rupa/z

I'm one of those "zero inbox" people. To me, an E-mail sitting in my inbox is a distraction-- a task I potentially have to do today. My system is pretty simple: I skim through each one. If it looks like something I have to do or respond to today, I give it a red flag. If it looks like something I have to do or respond to tomorrow, I give it an orange flag. If it's a multi-person thread wherein I'm waiting for more info from someone else, I flag it yellow. Anything else gets no flag. For all of them, I archive them away after I've read them to prevent them from becoming inbox-distractions.

Then at the end of the day, I'll review my red flags and do them, review my orange flags and do the ones I can, and review my yellow flags and ping them all to remind them to respond. Seems to work decently, but I often find I end up with a lot of yellow-flagged items because other people don't have as good E-mail habits.

A suggestion from someone who uses a similar system: get rid of yellow flags, and simply move those emails to whatever archive folder the "completed" emails would go to. A task where you're waiting for input from someone else is a task for that someone else, not for you. As such, it has no place in your inbox.

All in all, using inbox as a TODO list has been a great arrangement for me - both at work and privately.

This only seems to work when you interact exclusively with very reliable people. What if they never get back to you with their input?

In that case, if it's something they need, you can forget about it. If, on the other hand, it's something you need, then you need to treat the e-mail as a reminder that you need to follow up - essentially, another item in your TODO - so it needs to stay in your inbox.

Well, I wrote "you need to", but I'm describing what works for me. :) YMMV, obviously.

I've been using Inbox for Gmail ( https://inbox.google.com ) since launch and it handles most of the things the author talks about. Emails are treated as tasks, and it's a single mouse click or keyboard shortcut to do any of the following: create a reminder based on a given email, pin it for easier later retrieval, or archive it. That's basically how I manage my mail, along with a simple trick from "Getting Things Done" (which I haven't read), which is that if a task is only going to take a short time, do it immediately rather than putting it off.

Careful about those "quick tasks", you might die a death from thousand cuts. If you're doing something that takes time and concentration, it takes effort to context-switch your brain away from it, do the "quick task", and then context-switch back. If you keep getting distracted from the "big task", chances are that you will start making mistakes, or just do it badly. It's better to defer these "quick tasks", and then do them all at once - thus minimizing the context-switching from and to your "big task".

Just tell people that you'll get on their task "[in an hour/later today/today until lunch/...]", AND THEN REALLY DO IT, like an adult, responsible person. No touchy-feely patronizing nonsense about forgetting the tasks you defer, we're not schoolchildren.

Oh, I'm not processing email constantly, and definitely not while I'm in the flow. When I am processing email I've already set aside some time for it, and finish off the simple tasks immediately.

I'm one of those people with a bajillion unread emails -- 15,615 at the moment, but I feel like this is manufacturing a problem I don't have. Inbox zero or whatever does nothing for me. Here's like a sample of things I haven't bothered to click: "YMCA membership survey", "Recommended coursera courses", "grubhub order", "Mailing list update for a blog I read sometimes". These aren't really things I feel any sort of pressure to read, but I haven't put in a filter on them either because sometimes I want to see them. They're not really blocking me from seeing my important emails.

This notion that I'm "bad" at email or that I need to "do" something about this; why would I want to fix something that's working pretty much exactly how I want?

I could go mark them read even though I haven't read them and don't momentarily care to, but that only holds value to me if you assume that I view my unread email counter like some sort of unfinished task list -- which I don't. It's literally just a measure of things I haven't read. It means nothing to me.

Hmm. The problem with that approach is that among many things that mean nothing in your inbox, there are some that are quite meaningful. And these have the potential to get lost among the noise.

They don't get lost -- I'm quite literally saying this is not a problem for me. I have no intention of prescribing how other people should organize their email, because I can't imagine any universe where I would actually care about that, but this extremely long winded essay about how the way I'm doing it is wrong strikes me as absurd. I also think it's pretty weird someone would take the time to diagnose my apparent character flaws based on my email habits, and then propose solutions. Uh, thanks? Of all the world's problems focusing on why some people leave email unread seems borderline OCD.

Not to mention that a lot of the author's inferences are pretty insulting. "This means that when someone asks you to do a thing, you probably aren’t going to do it. You’re going to pretend to commit to it, and then you’re going to flake out when push comes to shove. You’re going to keep context-switching until all the deadlines have passed." Wow, really, you got all of that because I didn't bother to hit "Mark Read" on my grubhub order confirmation?

Many people have a legitimate problem handling their email and drop things on the floor they wish they didn't. It doesn't sound like you're one of those people, so the article wasn't for you, and that's fine.

For me _personally_, I archive the unimportant emails (like a grubhub order) so I don't waste time scanning over it next time i check my email. If I never archive it, I might end up scanning over it several times for no reason, and with keyboard shortcuts I can hit "x y j" once and not have deal with it again.

Your way is fine too. I just think some people really do need help being more organized and I thought the article did a pretty good job of talking about the non-technical problems many of them (but not you) have.

I would have zero issues if he was just proposing a solution to a problem that some people have, but he hasn't done that. He's suggested that using email in certain ways is incorrect and that it implies bad things about you.

"In other words: The thing you are bad at is saying ‘no’ to people. "

For fucks sake.

I'd also have no issues if this was on like the third page, but the fact it has this many upvotes suggests people agree with this, which makes me wonder: 1) WHY do you all care about other people's inbox habits? How does this impact you? Why do you even think it's your business in the least bit? 2) WHY do you presume you can actually infer anything important about a person based on that, to the point of saying some very insulting things about their character?

The author seems to believe we all inhabit the same bizarre world he does, where apparently most email is worthless, and yet your response to this apparently worthless stream of information implies many things about your character with a great deal of certainty. Like, what the fuck? Maybe there's a common sense middle ground where I get email notifications about things that don't require much action but are somewhat valuable to have, and I can read fast enough to parse the important things in a few seconds without having to spend significant time thinking about my email process.

If that system works for you, great! For a lot of people it doesn't, hence all the praise for Inbox Zero.

You're allowed to have your own system for managing e-mail, just like you can put your pencils wherever you want on your desk. Or hey, let's be crazy! You can even have no pencils on your desk!

I think this piece is for people for whom e-mail is a chore and for whom it is common practice to stare blankly at their inbox thinking "Oh, I should just reply...." and then spend an hour to write "OK" in the reply. If you're good at e-mail already then awesome.

I don't understand people complaining with lots of unread emails.. If you didn't read an email from X days ago or older, you won't ever do it. Just mark as read all [unread] mail from X days ago till the beginning of Time, and you are set to go.

What I despise most the is the desk drop in, especially for things that could be easily emailed. Sometimes even interrupting me to alert me in person that you've sent me an email.

However I've been told by a manager to use the desk drop in more, to get more visibility and make it look like I'm engaging with the team to outside observers

I recently had a manager say the same thing to me about Slack.

The founders were apparently trolling the tech channels and my name didn't come up enough. Mostly because I was busy working and not incessantly spamming giphy nonsense.

Needless to say I quit.

Some workplaces have the "fish-bowl" feeling, and Slack can really amplify that. Imagine having alerts come into a channel where your boss's boss is watching you acknowledge them, DM'ing him critiques of your work in realtime.

That is exactly what happened. The company is now imploding because the entirety of senior engineering staff has resigned over the last two weeks.

One of our founders left herself logged in on a QA device, needless to say the entire team got to read her emails for two weeks without her knowledge.

I don't like that either, but see the other responses in the thread where people admit to leaving hundreds (even thousands) of emails unread.

If it's a small number of people doing the "drop in" on you, maybe finding a way to let them know you they don't have to...that you'll answer them, would help?

This is interesting, as I sometimes do this. I don't like just writing an email requesting something and flinging it off to someone without talking to them in person. I put everything I need into an email. I'll then pop over just to say hey and explain. I guess I do this with people I don't usually communicate with.

Surely face to face contact is a good thing?

This duplication of communication confuses me. At which employer is the work pace slow enough to have so much face time? And how do you handle this with your remote coworkers, or those on completely different shifts?

> At which employer is the work pace slow enough to have so much face time?

I think the point is exactly opposite - you duplicate this communication when the thing is urgent. Face time creates this sense of urgency, whereas a simple email may be sitting in an inbox for days.

Of course, if communication is duplicated for every little meaningless detail, then I agree it probably means people have too much free time.

What do people think about using email as an alternative to social networks - i.e. creating lists of email addresses (groups), and sending out photos, jokes, opinions, etc. to those groups (e.g. an "All" group to send life updates, a "Cool" group that can take any joke, etc.)?

This is by and large how I operate. I don't do Facebook. I use Slack at work, because I have to, but I hate RTC in general.

I personally love email. It fits how I do things. I can take the time to compose carefully, it supports more than a sentence or two but is also fine for "me too!" comments, it is a fine quick-n-dirty file transfer tool (so long as you're not mailing a kernel source tarball or pile of RAW images), and, I think most importantly, sets expectations properly.

Same here. I have avoided Slack at work so far, but since colleagues are using Google Hangouts and Skype as well I end up using those. Usually the former, as I always have a Gmail window open and often forget to open Skype.

Sounds awful. It's a push model on someone else's terms.

Think of it this way -- would you want someone else deciding how often you'd look at their web page?

I was thinking primarily for close friends, but for broader contacts, I agree with you, so I was thinking of a system that would allow them to unsubscribe from certain topics (e.g. politics)

How do you unsubscribe from certain topics? Would you have to email your friend and ask him or her to not tell you about politics? There's a whole lot of social pressure that means people are reluctant to do that.

The idea would be that when you send an email, you give it a category, like politics. Then at the bottom of each person's email, there are two links: 1) Unsubscribe from person X's emails about category Y, and 2) Unsubscribe from all of person X's emails from this system

So if that person clicked link #1, the token in the link is verified that it was created for that email address, and then it's noted in a database. In the future, if person X sends another email for that category, it won't go to that person. I'm thinking the sender wouldn't even know that the person unsubscribed

Email, IMO, really isn't suitable for that mode of communication. Newsgroups, OTOH, were made for that type of communication.

Email really should just be used for 1-on-1 communication that's not meant to be read by anyone else other than the sender and recipient.

What if it is still 1-on-1 communication; so, imagine this: I use an app to write the email, select a group or set of contacts, and the system sends out a 1-on-1 style email to each one of those contacts?

Your original premise, as I understood it, was to send a message to a group of people and possibly have people comment on it. With your new proposal, the recipients would not be able to see each other's responses.

It also will shift the burden solely to you to answer any questions or provide clarification. If recipients were able to see other recipient responses, they could do some of the work for you.

But, for all the use cases I can think of with regards to sending messages to multiple recipients, I cannot really think of a good reason to prevent recipients from seeing other recipient responses barring some communication of a personal nature.

I think it'd be interesting to have an option for either type. I find a lot of commentary is suppressed because people don't want other people to see their thoughts, whereas with email, they can just reply directly with thoughts. However, I think you're right, that sometimes it's useful to have a group discussion. I'm thinking that would be a link at the bottom of the email that goes to a webapp that allows a more FB-like experience that people can opt-into.

I can't tell if this is clever baiting or not. This was email with friends before MySpace.

Not sure what you mean by clever baiting, but yeah, I guess I mean going back to the olden email days, at least for close friends

Curious how old the OP is because I got a good chuckle out of his comment.

31 :-)

I miss the pen-pal days of emails between friends.

This is how a lot of people, myself included, use SnapChat. The social network dynamic is totally different when the default is to include no one and you manually curate the list for each post.

I would tell you to use Google plus instead. I dislike any group email because it is too cheap. Blast fifty people a message that is going to take longer for them to read than it took you to write it?

And joke emails? Seriously I'd anybody wants a joke, they can Google that. No good reason to interrupt others.

Seems to have been hn'd

Here's a google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

Completely agree.

We use Skype chat at my company for internal communications and it is far more distracting than email.

Some people seem to 'over-communicate' when using real-time chat, meaning that my Skype is flashing non-stop. Yes, I can turn off the notifications but then, what's the point of using real-time chat versus email?

when i'm on skype for work i feel like there's a giant eye hovering to my left, watching me. i drop out of skype early in the day because i don't like it.

I have noticed this too. I find it distracting and often low signal to noise discussion.

I keep Slack on Do Not Disturb mode anytime I'm writing code. If someone really needs to reach me in realtime, they can @ me to trigger the icon badge. Our Slack team has hundreds of messages a day, but of those maybe 2-3 require my immediate attention.

Email wasn't designed to be used the way we use it now.

It's not a to-do list protocol. In fact, as Paul Graham has put it, it's a disastrously bad todo list (Source: http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html)

It's not a messaging protocol - email was never built for conversations, which is why conversations over email often get clunky, confusing and finding some piece of information later is near-impossible.

No wonder people just plain don't like email as a communication method. It was invented in the 70s and it was intended for much lower volumes (Source: http://www.techworld.com/startups/skype-cofounder-jaan-talli...)

The thing is, most 'email killers' like Slack are closed systems and thus have no shot at replacing email - the reason why email has persevered is its openness, how it is the lowest common denominator in online communications (ahem, 2,5bn users worldwide).

Instead of a new open protocol, Fleep (https://fleep.io) has built a messenger that relies on the email protocol by integrating with email seamlessly. With Fleep, you can send messages to anyone who has an email address - if they're not a Fleep user yet, they will receive the messages as normal emails. As a Fleep user, however, you already get the improved conversational experience of emails.

(Full disclosure: I do work at Fleep and I absolutely love the product, the ambition and the ingenious approach our founding team has taken to merging IM & email.)

Email was built for conversations. Reverse in everything read to people forcing by that ruined Office Microsoft unfortunately.

Microsoft didn't force that, they reflected it. Microsoft just made their software facilitate what users actually wanted to do. They don't care about all that tedious effort to scroll and selectively trim and indent and format quotes for a neatly curated conversation. They just want to start typing. They just want all that junk out of their way. Microsoft merely reduced resistance to what users were already finding natural to do.

Email was built as a digital version of snail mail. I guess good old mail services are conversations in a way - but both snail mail and email are more for sharing information than having a written conversation.

Sort of like - I'll send this piece of information out, and maybe I'll get something in response. Maybe I won't.

Good read. I like his point that you should read your inbox oldest first, or else you reward the most annoying correspondents. This also encourages the "handle it once" ethos, because you need to traverse older items to get to new ones.

Sadly there doesn't seem to be any way to tell Gmail to sort by ascending date - please enlighten me if there is.

One thing I would say in disagreement is that you can use filters and labels to your advantage even with this mentality. I agree that keeping things labeled and archived hasn't done me much good. Lately what I do instead is use filters to label things by category, just so I can archive them faster. As I archive, I also remove the label. For instance, "Newsletter", "Transaction", etc. When I look at a bunch of things of one type, I don't have to make as big a context switch between them, and I can quickly determine which I care about. ("Recruiter" is a fun filter that is a perpetual work in progress.)

I've found the trick to email is filter/delete/archive with extreme prejudice. It's hard to fall into but-I-might-need-it-later mode if you never saw it in the first place.

OT, but my first reaction to this article was how much I loved that font. Looked it up, it's Monda, and available on Google Fonts https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Monda.

tl;dr : "Turn Messages Into Tasks"

Man, I miss Agenda :( It basically did that automatically.

I've been looking for a different interface for email that focuses on actions and not emails. Other types of communication, e.g. RSS, could feed actions into the same interface. Every incoming email is an intended action: a text that you intend to read and decide to either take any number of actions on.

At different times of the day, different filters apply. During work hours, only work mails and a few personal contacts get through the filter and on my 'read mail' task. I perform the 'read mail' task a few times during work.

Outside of work, only mails with private topics will get through. Phone and text can be used for urgent work issues. For mailing lists, each updated thread is one read task.

Every read task can lead to one or more immediate or intended actions. Intended actions have categories.

Different types of actions:

- current action: the action I'm taking right now

- action stack: a current action can lead to a small subactions

- intended action: action that is in the system and shows up as a possible current action. This includes sports and cooking.

- planned action: an action with a fixed start time, usually these are synchronous with actions of other people e.g. meetings or travel.

An important feature of this interface is to group and filter actions by context. When working on project X, only show actions of project X. This reduces the huge number of context switches the many people struggle with.

Every action that is taken is linked to the action that led to it. Sending email gives the option to create an intended action for a follow-up when there is no reply from the receiver within a set time.

While an action is being performed, your computer IO is monitored. These data packets, e.g. git commits, changed files, emails sent, visited web pages, sent web forms, can be included in an action report. This way, there is a simple report after each action.

All action reports form your archive. The archive are your past actions, they are out of your way once you've dealt with them.

Saying "No" does help. I answer much mail with "UNSUBSCRIBE", then blacklist the sender in Thunderbird. Almost all spam gets filtered, as do messages mentioning "survey" or "webinar".

If anyone wants to help build this stuff, you should build a plugin on Nylas N1. :) https://github.com/nylas/n1

> but the defining characteristic of email is that it is the primary mode of communication that we use, both professionally and personally, when we are asking someone else to perform a task.

what the fuck. This is so specious. I don't use email this way at all.

The website looks down.. any mirror?

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