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Comment by ApolloVonZ | Hacker News Reader

I'd disagree. E-Mail is useful for invoices, customer contact, first point of contact or 2nd point of contact if someone tried to reach out per Facebook etc. and a serious business relation needs to be formed. However at work we switched to Slack a while back and it was such a relieve! Trying to organize projects per mail was just horrible. Especially when you got non technical staff involved that doesn't correctly forward or answer email and uses reply-all and reply interchangeably, or switches between personal and shared accounts without noticing it. Slack is not perfect but for us it did the job and still does.

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One aspect I miss with Slack/Teams/IM is a good ability to postpone stuff. For example, I receive an e-mail I know I need to do something in 1-4 months. So I keep that mail in my inbox and as long as something is in the inbox, there is some work pending/due.

I have not yet found a good way to do that in Slack (reliably) and not relying on another tool.

E-Mail in that way is just great as a message is just a text file. You can put it wherever you want and reorganize it the way you want.

Try to attach a slack conversation to an issue tracking system. Won‘t work. Do it with e-mail: it‘s just a text file.

Try to post-pone stuff or organize information in folders. Won‘t work. Do it with e-mail, hell I can even move messages from one account to another.

My point is: Slack will never replace e-mail, it is just an extension of ways we communicate. And that‘s is biggest advantage and disadvantage: it‘s a tool that makes communication sometimes easier, but is‘s also another tool I need to regularly check besides all other communication tools I already have.

It really depends on the personal and companies workflow though. My personal email account also only has messages that I still need to deal with. However our shared accounts can get quite messy at times. Slack does have the option to set different reminders though, you can even ask Slack to remind you to go back to a specific message in let's say four months. ;) But to be honest, if there is something that needs to be done at a certain point I'd always use an actual reminder/task or calendar app. Otherwise the risk of it being overlooked, maybe because someone is sick, or there is a flood of mails from another project that day and I don't get too look at the one email I wanted to deal with today. So I guess it really depends on the workflow and the people you work with. I think flexibility is the key in adapting your workflow to everyone's abilities and the companies needs but the same time if something has been working for a specific use case, then why change it. : )

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