What Paul Graham got right – and what he missed – about email

As I was reading this, I'm thinking 'there's no insights in this, it's just a lot of questions'.

Get to the bottom paragraph, and it's an advert for their product, Zoho SalesInbox.

I think it's now time that large blog platforms like Medium, clearly mark at the beginning if a post is promotional fluff or not (Paper press legally have to do this, so why not Digital?).

Anyway, back to the subject in hand, I think email gets a bad bashing. Yes it's clearly no longer fit for purpose if your company is a fresh startup with great ideas, and a breakneck agile ethos, but for us mere mortals who are basically chained to a corporate desk in a workplace that's been around for decades with such and ingrained culture that a sandstorm couldn't wipe it, it's the cornerstone of how we work. Here's why:

1. Long form requests and file attachments are still commonly sent over email - it's your copy to do with what you want.

2. It's easy to sort and search by a defined subject or keyword, and see the threaded conversation in isolation from everything else.

3. It's a standard protocol - everything can send an email - this is both a blessing and curse really.

4. It's got a chain of custody (of sorts), once it's been read in your inbox, it's basically immutable - no takey-backseys by deleting that bit of the conversation in IM or a forum post.

5. In larger organisations it's quite common for people to write full documents in the email body, complete with headers and formatting and even diagrams! Try doing that in Slack :)

However, I'd love to see an overhaul of the system. As someone who recently left a role that had death-by-email every day I do agree that too many things are sent over email, and people need to be more judicious with their use of 'reply all' (or even actively trimming/adding people when required). There also needs to be attempts at presenting emails in a new way - the folder+inbox paradigm is no longer optimal.

As long as the right tool is used for the right job, I think that IM and Email and Phone all should happily co-exist...

After all, you can't build a house with just one hammer.

Email, and making email better, is a topic everyone connected to the internet should care about. I know I do. I'm especially intrigued by how email can be tailored to different needs. Whilst I'm not in sales, I can see the value here. Intrigued to hear others thoughts.