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Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

For #1, what I have found works best is to nix the huge amount of text you'd otherwise write in the email and put it in a link. A document maybe, or better yet a beautiful portal that works on desktop and mobile.

That way the email is short AND the link can be reshared!

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You lose the ability to search though. And then you've to worry about whether document was on Dropbox, Google Drive or just a link somewhere.

I had a problem where we did exactly that, "please read the document at this link because <list of reasons>". Check the logs, person had not even clicked on it. Asked them about why they had not read the document mentioned in email, and proceeded to show their phone's email app, said "Yes, I read it, see here, the message is marked read in my email."

That doesn't work when your recipients are frequent business travellers who have only intermittent Internet connectivity and the link is behind a corporate firewall. For those people I usually include the document as an attachment. Not ideal but it keeps the discussion moving.

That's a terrific idea, if that kind of CMS-ish system is available to you or within your organization. Unfortunately I've never been exposed to or have much experience with something like that : (

> CMS-ish system

That's Google Docs or Office 365.

Office 365 is the closest I've experienced. I actually kinda like it. My biggest use-case is wider spread documentation that is inappropriate to distribute as an attachment.

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