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Comment by clouddrover | Hacker News Reader

No, we don't want that. I find Slack to be slow, clumsy, and inefficient. Monolithic services like Slack don't provide the flexibility of federated services like email.

I use a desktop mail client. It's faster, has more powerful search features, works with any email service, I don't need to pay anyone a fee to access my old mail, and I can use it even when I'm offline.

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On the other hand I must say Slack is the perfect tool for couples. You can create channels for #restaurantstotry #moviestowatch #hikes and so on, and it is possible to leave notifications on for just that one workspace while turning off literally all other notifications and calls on your phone. The API integrations can also allow you to give each other access to smart locks, thermostats, expense tracking, and other things if you wish.

Or, you could, you know, talk directly to your partner...

I meant as a couples-oriented replacement for WeChat/SMS/FB messenger/WhatsApp that cat organize things better, not a replacement for the real life part

Ah, touche

Trello. Not only can you add upvotes and all, but you can tag things with locations and then get a map view - great for vacation planning.

Bump for Trello. I use it to manage my team (who work remotely) and personal life, too. We use it for vacations, long-tern house projects (gardening, building things, etc.)

I've tried Slack in a few different contexts and have always found that the chat-based interface encouraged users to do just that: chat.

A combo of Trello + email work better for keeping communication focused on the product/project, in my experience.

It would make sense for apple iMessage to integrate said features.

Especially for families that aren't all on Apple.

Their biggest lock-in and I think a reason a large portion of average users don't switch to Android. I know this to be true for both of my siblings, as well as my wife's entire family.

Or we could keep things simple and just have one shared Notes file or Google Doc with separate headers with those hashtags. The above sounds stressful

We use this for now, but with Slack there is the combination of IM with lists and TODO items. The alerts help us note when something is new and updated.

What is interesting to me is how our society is slowly evolving the personal, short-term information storage and retrieval. That is how I view Slack, but without paying for the storage, it's in a sense used only for short-term memory. Not for important things like memories, where Google Docs is for memories and deeper thoughts.

Sounds like this could be solved with good old Post-It notes, but maybe I'm old-fashioned..

You can't stick a post-it note to the fridge from the office. I would agree in spirit though that a todo list would work better, something like Todoist

Interesting, it is true that a simple text box is the easiest, fastest input method making it the most likely to use when in a rush/taking quick notes. I would have gone for something like workflowy (https://workflowy.com/) or dynalist (https://dynalist.io/) but having a single tool for both IM and note taking beats it. You could always have a bot that puts your slack content in those anyway. I shall take inspiration from this.

Which desktop mail client do you recommend? I keep trying to leave g-apps, but the search (and address autocomplete) keeps dragging me back. I'm more than happy to pay for quality, if that makes a difference.

Thunderbird?

I use Thunderbird daily, to manage multiple email accounts, and I love it very much. I wouldn't, though, call its search functionality "good". For simple queries it works so-so, but for anything complex I end up logging into the Gmail or O365 web apps.

This is pretty much my only gripe with it. And for daily use, I dramatically prefer it over webmail.

One other thing that makes me chuckle more than anything... the scam email detection heuristics count cross-domain images to be indicators of scams/phishing. I have two clients who have signature images linked from a different domain, and every message has a red header that warns "THIS MESSAGE MAY BE A SCAM". More than you know, Thunderbird. More than you know.

I love open source as much as the next person but thunderbird is bad, not evolution bad, but bad. If you have hundreds of thousands of email messages from a decade of email it just breaks.

I’m +1 on superhuman but I miss sparrow.

Do you have an invite for Superhuman?

Yeah, definitely miss Sparrow.

I'm actually pretty amazed at how well Thunderbird seems to handle my 5 email accounts with messages going back to 2004. Unless I have to search...

My 12 accounts are spread over a handful of providers, with emails going back to 2006 in some; While I agree thunderbird's search is inferior to gmail's, its global indexer is decent in capabilities and horrible in ux, whereas the "standard" search is horrible in capabilities and speed, but decent in ux.

I use the "expression search" addon, which is perfect as long as you only need to search on metadata; and the global indexer when I do. It's not perfect, but it doesn't make me want to quit in anger, and not even to surrender my privacy to google.

To be honest, Thunderbird isn't the most shining e-mail client. First of all, its UI lacks appeal (for example, it doesn't support viewing conversations in a single page, although you can install a plugin for it). And it is sometimes pretty sluggish (probably because it is made with XULRunner, similar to Electron)

But I still use Thunderbird despite all these problems. It is the only email client that supports both Windows and Linux, supports HTML, and doesn't require you to create an account and connect to a third-party DB to use it (I'm looking at you, Mailspring!)

Superhuman

I wondered what happened to Superhuman earlier today, did they ever ship? Same sign up page and inactive twitter for years.

Seem to be still pushing some small UX features but that's all I know

Built by the creator of Gmail so it'll probably be an invite/referral only thing for 5 years or so..

Mutt.

In all seriousness.

Kmail (or KDE's integrated PIM, Kontact), are GUI alternatives.

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