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Comment by morganvachon | Hacker News Reader

It's a use case thing. I would argue that for most people who actually still use email for communication with peers, images and attachments are an afterthought. For images, we have image hosting sites, and for attachments we have a plethora of cloud hosting services that allow you to send a link instead of the entire attachment.

That said, there's a happy medium between console based email and bloated, buggy clients like Thunderbird. Claws Mail is a very old-school graphical client that supports modern email features, and it's about as tweakable as it gets.

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> for attachments we have a plethora of cloud hosting services that allow you to send a link instead of the entire attachment.

Is there an email client that, when you drag a file icon into the composition window, doesn't attach the file but instead uploads the file to cloud storage and inserts a link? Now that I think about it, that's basically what Apple Mail's Mail Drop feature does (file is uploaded to iCloud, I think on send, recipients don't have to use Apple Mail and the file only remains on the server 30 days).

Thinking about the usual steps to attach a file compared to including a link to a hosted file, I think the latter much more takes one mentally out of the composition mode to deal with the hosting/sharing; dragging in a file attachment

"I'm writing an email that references a file. I get out of email to find the file. I'm dragging the file into the message window. I'm sending the email, it seems like its taking longer to send because it's a large file attachment."

"I'm writing an email that references a file. I get out of email to find the file. I move (or copy) the file to my cloud storage place (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.). I set the file to be shared. I copy the link to the file. I go back to my email and paste the link (or write some link text in HTML email and paste the URL). I'm sending the email."

>> Is there an email client that, when you drag a file icon into the composition window, doesn't attach the file but instead uploads the file to cloud storage and inserts a link?

Trillian is IM, but I believe it works that way

Box for Outlook does this....

> I would argue that for most people who actually still use email for communication with peers, images and attachments are an afterthought.

Are you actually convinced of that, or are you being inflammatory? Because, in 2017, it's hilariously far afield of most folks' email use patterns both at work and at home. Do you only ever communicate using text -- and plain text at that?

I work for a small software company - ie, full of nerds. We use screencaps marked up in email ALL THE TIME to communicate about changes and whatnot. Sure, I guess we could put it in a Word doc or HTML doc, but why bother when we can do it in the email client?

My email client is text only. Of course I have it setup that I can easily extract all attachments and then point a web browser at them.

In my experience, it is rare that I need to look at an image or pdf, etc.

I'm not doing web development, so there is no particular reason any colleague would send me a screenshot.

I was under the impression that most software houses and tech startups migrated to Slack or similar group messaging long ago, which offers much better handling of attachments and collaboration. Email is still heavily used in government, mostly on Exchange servers, and I can see attachments being a big thing there (I work for local government and that's our setup). In the home consumer world, it's nearly all iMessage/Hangouts/SMS/WhatsApp etc.

Again, these are my observations and perhaps my window isn't big enough.

I can only speak to my experience, but email is very very much a part of our world in our software company. It's WAY better than Slack or other IM/group chat tool for search and archiving later -- and, let's be honest, a WHOLE LOT of stuff gets decided in email, so that's pretty important.

With a distributed team, it's even moreso. Plus, since we're distributed, the idea of email-as-document (with rich formatting and inline images) is just that much more normal.

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