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Comment by chrisweekly | Hacker News Reader

> "email -- which is IMO far superior to "async slack" in every way possible."

You're entitled to your preferences, but "far superior... in every way" is a bit hyperbolic. In practice, with email, usage patterns vary wildly (forward, reply, reply-all, cc, bcc). IME Slack channels are cleaner and provide several benefits. Not just the option for ~realtime / synchronous chat (where email doesn't work at all), but the mechanisms for tagging users and other channels; "pinning" key attachments; all its 3rd party integrations (ie, it's viable as a "hub" for communications and record-keeping thereof)... Don't get me wrong; it's far from perfect, and email -- when used properly -- has substantial strengths. But so does Slack. An open-source, self-hosted Slack clone would be my strong preference.

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You can "tag" people with email. Lots of people use this highly effective pattern:

FW: Re: FW: Fw: Re: RE: Update on project

hey chrisweekly, what do you think of this?

Regards,

John Doe, MSc, CPA, CMA, TLA,

CISAOO

Big Corp

123 Fake St

Someplace, OT 90210

Phone 2025551234 x364375

Fax 2025553536

Cell 2025553788

Pager 20255522226

Check out our FacedIn page!

[Broken image] [Broken image] [Broken image] [Broken image] [Broken image]

Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.

This message (including any attachments) is confidential and may be privileged. It may be read, copied and used only by the intended recipient. If you have received it in error please contact the sender (by return E-Mail) immediately and delete this message. Any unauthorized use or dissemination of this message in whole or in part is strictly prohibited. Please note that, for organisational reasons, the personal E-Mail address of the sender is not available for matters subject to a deadline.

[Broken image] [Broken image]

---------

[Chain of 92 emails; the important ones are #36 and #73 but you won't figure that out until at least an hour of scrolling]

Don't forget that at least three threads have forked from this because some nimrod clicked Reply instead of Reply All

Hi John --

Please remember that our corporate standard of email etiquette, as referenced in the employee handbook wiki [link], is to inline our responses while removing unrelated content. We've found that method to be very effective for the last thirty years.

Also note that the standard for internal signatures [link] is 2 lines:

NAME OR NICKNAME DEPARTMENT

and that the standard for external signatures is a maximum of four lines [link] with the following recommendation: NAME DEPARTMENT / COMPANY DEPARTMENT CONTACT URL

Finally, I don't know who told you to put all those images and disclaimers in, but Legal advises that you can't discuss confidential info in external emails, so you don't need disclaimers. You don't get privilege unless you work in Legal, either.

Yours,

dsr_ Security

Anyone talking to Legal gets privilege. Not only Legal.

The first thing that Legal says is "You don't communicate privileged information by email. Call me."

Try working in a non IT company. Its IT itself who set up the mile long footer and people will have no idea or no authorization tot change it.

+1, I agree strongly that the "channel" is a powerful UX metaphor and enables better high-throughput communications, and that other modern ideas are expressed in chat applications in a way that's more comfortable to us than they are within email.

I also believe that there's a big gap between traditional text chat and an audio/video meeting, where casual discussion and emotion trade off against calendar space and long periods of captured focus -- so I hope we have progress to make here!

(I posted in a different thread in this submission that I believe in this so strongly that I'm making a product to try to bridge that gap, but I won't muddy things by re-linking it repeatedly.)

> An open-source, self-hosted Slack clone would be my strong preference.

Are you suggesting that a non-free, expensive, SaaS, IRC/rocket/mattermost/element/etc clone is not where we should be aiming?

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