Ask HN: Do you still use email? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you still use email?

40 pointsx14km2d82 comments

In recent years, I have noticed that fewer and fewer people in my circle of friends use e-mail. I also use it less and less personally and have switched to alternatives. Is this just a subjective perception of mine or are there similar tendencies among you?

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Yes! Both for personal and professional communication. It is by far the best channel for me.

I bemoan all chat-like things for a few reasons:

- they don't give space to formulate thoughts well, so they push thus the problem to the other person

- the messages are very short, so it is hard to focus (unlike reading a medium-size email text)

- they expect an instant reply (again, either devastate focus or make it easy to miss an important message)

- there are (too) many such communicators (to name a few: Slack, Discord, Messenger, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram); email is just email

- most of them mix crucial communication with noise (by design); I rarely get important information mixed with gossips, jokes and news in professional emails

Of course, I have to use such communicators (as fewer and fewer friends use email), but my preference is to restrict them to things requiring a real-time response rather than making them a default solution.

I've done email heavy companies and slack heavy ones and I infinitely prefer Email heavy any day of the week. Slack is just so needy and in your face - people can 'see' you typing(!). Email gives you a little distance. So now that I'm at a slack heavy operation I regularly log out of slack for a few hours at a time. I'll get to your question when _I'm_ ready for it.

Seems like it depends on work culture. If the expectation is you should answer ASAP, that's detrimental to coders. But if it's expected that you can respond sometime within a few hours, all is well.

I strongly prefer Slack to email: the ability to search through past conversations, start multi-person conversations, and discuss things on a channel (with searchable history and sub-threads).

> If the expectation is you should answer ASAP, that's detrimental to coders.

This reminds me of a Donald Knuth quote. I forget how it went exactly, but was something like this, "Some people have jobs that require them to be on top of things. My job requires me to be on the bottom of things. So I can't be interrupted by email."

IMO semi ephemeral nature of free Slack is a feature for me. I used to keep zero inbox too, only archiving obviously important messages.

If it’s not in ticket, git or wiki - it’s your fault.

We are tiny, globally distributed team focused on documenting well so maybe thats why it works.

> the ability to search through past conversations, start multi-person conversations, and discuss things on a channel (with searchable history and sub-threads).

With a good email client you can do those things. E.g. you can make rules to move emails into folders, etc.

Sure Slack is probably quicker at doing those things, but I prefer not having to rely on a 3rd party to run my business.

> I strongly prefer Slack to email: the ability to search through past conversations, start multi-person conversations, and discuss things on a channel (with searchable history and sub-threads).

It's a real shame I can't search my emails or CC people in. Oh...

I won't pretend that they're the same thing, but those reasons to prefer ~Slack are things people readily do with email.

The overall issue with Slack is that a channel that gets busy, you lose all context, and the decision becomes do I want to scroll back to figure it out, or just ignore it. I'd much rather prefer email. As people tend be more succinct and focus more on writing and summarizing, than just be a trail of thoughts.

Slack is one of the new breed of applications that really tries its best to get you to pay attention to it all the time. Nevertheless, it's pretty manageable if you spend a little time going around and muting channels and turning off OS-integrated notifications.

IMO, both Slack and Email have their places. Slack is better for long-running conversations with a lot of rapid back and forth of mostly short messages involving a dozen-ish people. Email is better for making requests expected to be responded to in hours or days and sending longer and more detailed descriptions.

The worst thing is you cannot mute @everyone.

The worst things are the often-non-repeatable or content-sensitive key mappings.

Press up once to edit the last message. Press enter. Press up again nothing happens.

Enter means enter except within a code block when it means shift-enter.

It feels as awful as using Matlab and missing the += from Octave. Like no one tried to use their own product. It makes me sad.

I imagine not as many people get in car accidents responding to email as they do responding to text messages, but, I could be wrong.

Why not use Do Not Disturb mode?

Because nobody actually pays attention to it and every messenger has a slightly different method of setting it, not to mention the ambiguously “cute” status messages that require interpretation to decipher.

But mostly because Do Not Disturb means Immediate Interrupt.

Yes. And forever will: it's the only truly decentralized communication system out there. And I run my own mail stack.

How do you feel about matrix? I've heard it as a counter point to the point you made but never really looked into it.

Matrix is interesting, but could replace IRC or Discord, not email. It also doesn’t have many users, even with bridging, but pretty much everyone has an email account.

Someone is (supposed to) building a proper Email bridge for Matrix through GSOC.

I've heard bad things from people running matrix servers.

IM is also not really a great replacement for email.

> I've heard bad things from people running matrix servers

Could you expand on this? I haven't actually noticed anything detrimental, and resource usage has actually been falling as the dev team makes improvements - though in fairness I'm running it on a beefy server that also hosts Plex, Polaris, and more.

synapse is:

a, fragile, depends on a lot of external libs (eg. hazmat, which needs sslv3 compiles openssl)

b, eats a lof of resources when using medium size and above federated rooms

And there are no other servers ready for production.

I have heard that Synapse is fragile the first time Can you expand?

how's your whitelisting going? that's what killed me: i could never get my keys right and my stuff kept getting filtered. ended up using runbox.

I've gone the opposite direction. I use and wish people used email more and more. It's hard to beat the ubiquity of email. It's flexible, easily searchable, and of you own your own domain, easy to control.

One example: when I was in high school, Facebook seemed like a natural choice to use for our graduating class to communicate things like reunions and whatnot. A little over a decade later, and that FB group is only capable of reaching a very small number of people. It's too bad we didn't just set up a mailing list.

I cannot imagine life without the searchable storage which is email (to me). Work emails stay forever and information density is much higher than a chat, plus attachments are right there where I need them. Newsletters are often valuable reminders, and of course everything I ever bought can be tracked in emails. I don't have any replacement for those.

Lack of basic formatting (links, fixed-width-blocks, bold, italic, strikethrough) and media-embedding in a way that's non-terrible is a problem. HTML email partially solves that, but sucks and provides way too much formatting control. The threading's not great either. Otherwise I like email quite a bit. I'd consider switching back to it from chat programs/texting for friends-and-family communication if those problems could be fixed, somehow.

Threading used to be better in email clients. Then everyone went with Google's flat "conversation" presentation. Not that it was easy, or 100% reliable, but it was present in more email clients than it is today.

I don't use email for daily friends-family communication (doesn't have any of the needs I listed in OC) so I agree texting is the ideal tool for them. But for work communications? Chat has zero formatting anyway, even in comparison to text-only email. And while threading depends on the used client, it's more eye candy than a real need, if email search works (which it should).

> Chat has zero formatting anyway, even in comparison to text-only email.

Slack and WhatsApp support pointy-click GUI formatting and markdown-alike formatting for the things I mentioned. I think similar features are common in other options (Discord, Signal, WeeChat, whatever they're calling Riot now, Telegram, I would assume all those have something similar) It's short-form messaging so you can't, say, post a series of images with comments under each one, all in one message... but because of the medium, it's natural to just send that as multiple messages, each with one image and comment, anyway.

Tables, lists, and headings (for obvious reasons, in that case—it's not natural to send messages long enough to need them) aren't present in any chat systems I've seen. I think the more mobile-oriented options (WhatsApp) may not support fixed-width (AKA code) blocks, but Slack and some others do. Slack (and maybe others) also has support for solo or collaborative formatted document creation & sharing, which does allow headings and lists and tables and such, the UI for which isn't all that different from creating an email, except that the results are more consistent for all readers. Those (and pretty much any other documents) can simply be posted in any thread or conversation.

That's what I miss in email. Text-only email is fine for what it is, but HTML email is crap. Something in-between would be nice. Better UI for inlining, say, Markdown, would be great, and could be sent over plain-text email, but that's mostly up to clients to provide a useful reading-and-writing interface for that, so it's hard to get into a workflow of using that sort of thing unless all involved have similarly-capable clients.

99% of the emails I receive on my personal email account are automated emails from bots for everything I do.

Buy a ticket to some place? Email. Bill to pay? Email. Doctor appointment? Reminder email, email summary, email bill. Ordered food? Email.

For work I actually receive emails from real people, many times a day.

Open protocols are good. Long live to email. And IRC :).

There are a couple of newsletters I want (shocking to some, I know). There are transactional emails I definitely want (receipts, pw resets, verification, etc). These are true of both personal and work. For work, I use email for notifications in our ticket management system, github, pager duty, etc. I also use it for any async comms that need a "paper trail." Formal decisions, formal asks, etc. Ideally, these emails are sent on google groups lists as that keeps history for new additions to the distribution list.

I wish more people still wrote personal emails to friends and family. I do with a couple of people. I sent a happy birthday email to an old buddy who I hadn't talked to in years and we had a small exchange. I still share some things with family via email, but most family comms are group chat sms now - which would probably be a better experience if we went to a dedicated service. People getting new numbers and adding/removing people to the group sms thread is impossible.

Most people will invest much more time writing an email, so they tend to be much more valuable later - more information, more critical thought...

I use email a lot. Just not to communicate with friends.

Personal email:

* Digital records

* Email newsletters

* Transactions

* Notifications

Work email:

* Almost everything. I'd collapse in within a week if I couldn't write/read long form communications to discuss complex topics with colleagues.

Email preferred. Asynchronous by design and expectation.

I write a lot of long emails, essentially blog posts, about my trucking travels to a small handful of family and friends. Lots of photos inline with commentary.

Most of my other communication is via email, except when I really need my young adult son to read and respond. Then text is more reliable.

It is the only electronic medium for any serious communication. Really, what else is there?

For casual chats and disposable communications, there is WhatsApp, etc.

Personal email account uses:

1 - Transactional emails.

... that's it.

[edit] My other uses for email started dropping off around 2010 and were mostly gone by 2015 or so.

Business email account uses:

1 - Transactional emails

2 - Communicating with vendors and other parties outside the organization.

3 - Communicating with people who like email and are too high-up in the company to be ignored if they insist on using email.

Seems like we’ve finally put a dent on our dependency to Gmail! Maybe it is possible to lose de facto monopoly on emails, even if you are Google.

(Of course I am aware that email is required to subscribe to all the other services, so we still depend on being given continued service by Gmail).

Actually, reading over my own list of uses there made me realize that I could probably self-host my personal email server. Most of the problems with self-hosting are sending, not receiving, and I almost never send an email from that account.

Same. Plus lots of Github threads in my work email.

It's a subjective perception of yours. I'm not seeing any changes in my life or the people around me.

In my case whatsapp web has made a dent in email usage. Just as convenient to type, but instant feedback and easier rich media use i.e. send and receive pictures and videos.

I'm not proud of myself for that, being an old school "open data formats" person. My email still goes through Thunderbird, which faithfully downloads and archives even stuff composed in Gmail. Whereas Whatsapp data is siloed and (to my knowledge) not easily exported from the app to an archivable format.

As for email. Generally used with older folks like my mom, or for stuff with half a dozen recipients like family vacation planning. Luckily pretty much everyone I know of any age is still reachable by email, even if they don't write much of it.

Yes, because almost everything else also sux and/or is proprietary.

What else could you use that is so mainstream, easy to setup and use, and that you can keep stored forever.

Email has its problems, but nothing better exists now.

In the work environment, we use emails first, slack second, and skype/zoom third. We all agree that emails are far better as a source of record/comprehensive discussion than any IM program, so slack is basically only used for throwaway conversations.

In my social life, it's probably facebook messenger first (most people are on it), discord second, skype third, emails only to older family members. We also send physical mail if we want the communication to feel more "special".

At work yes, personally, some. WhatsApp/iMessage/Signal largely supplant the need for me as most of my circle doesn't engage in longform communication with each other anymore, even family. Text messages and audio/video/picture messaging allow us to communicate more rapidly and engage in a dialogue, but also produce longer content (postcard or personal note length, not letter length) without it feeling like too much over the chat service.

Email is still used among some of us on collaborative projects, but if it's not a project, it's not over email. Even then, with online document editors (Google Sheets and Docs, for instance, or GitHub and kin for code), there's little need for email anymore for that except for certain coordination and longer form communication of ideas among the groups that doesn't quite fit into an existing document yet.

Google Wave could've been a good tool for that, but naturally Google fucked it up so email survived for this use-case for us.

Yes, definitely, both with people I know and sometimes others. I use only plain text email, not HTML (and I use email software that cannot read HTML email; it will display the plain part if there is one, otherwise the HTML code is displayed without being interpreted as HTML). I run my own email, and when I am at the computer, can see in the status line if there are any new messages (I programmed it to count the number of lines that start with "From " in the mail box file, whenever the file has been modified).

However, for open discussions though and other communications, etc. I prefer NNTP. For fast communication of short messages, IRC is good (both for public and for private messages). For an extended private communication with fast messages, if there are only two people communicating (as the role playing game I play currently is since I am the only player other than the GM), a plain direct connection works fine; no specialized software or protocols are needed.

After complaining about emails flooding my work day - Slack was a relief. But now, I have ended up with 300 slack channels - I have "star"red 20 of them - and I can't keep track of DMs, pings, threads.

So My email inbox is now somehow cleaner - if I exclude a lot of automated notifications.

Yes, I do. It's one of the most important aspects of my workflow. So yes, in terms of work-related tasks, extensively.

As for personal use-cases, I mostly use it for help from Technical Support, inquiries at my academic institution, sometimes might email my friends something important.

Email is really the only way for structured, asynchronous, long-form communication. Everything that requires more than a short paragraph and/or that you want to be able to sort/list/filter/group by (thread) subject, by correspondent, date range, keyword, etc. in the long term. You can cc, forward, flag as (not) important, explicitly control the (un)read status, and many other operations. Emails are like files, in that they are not tethered to a service, but you can move and copy them around in a robust fashion. I have email archives going back ~20 years. Try that with any other messaging solution (except NNTP and IRC logs I guess).

That being said, a native desktop client is a must.

I check my email accounts semi-regularly. If you email me, I'll see it in a day or two. As far as I'm concerned, email is meant to be asynchronous, and I use it that way.

I'm currently at a ~133 person fully-remote healthcare innovation group and I have received 7 e-mails so far this week. We use very little e-mail, mostly just for scheduling meetings. We mostly communicate in Slack and coordinate our work in Smartsheets.

My last three gigs were at ~2000-to-5000 person corps and it wasn't uncommon for me to get 100 e-mails a day which I mostly filtered with rules. Previous corps used TFS to coordinate workflow and had no officially sanctioned chat system.

can you share what group you work with?

Email 98% of the time. I also take care to explain very well to all my contacts, face to face, why I prefer email, how I work and so on. Practically everybody respect my choice and it really works. I can dedicate time to dealing with request and they don't interfere with other aspects of my work and personal life.

But I am flexible: sometimes a synchronous channel is needed, for example to mentor a new employee. There is nothing wrong with it as long as it's of limited duration.

To sign up to alternatives, I usually need an email address. To sign up to email, I have yet to be required to link to one of the many alternatives. Here are my alternatives:

physically meeting with people, if possible.

phone calls over a landline!

video calls: jit.si, skype, zoom

news sites/feeds/aggregators with comments: Hacker News

bbs: reddit

usenet

I tried Slack for a bit, but found it unbearable to use. My email use may have declined, but this definitely not because I am using alternatives more. Perhaps, fewer and fewer people want to be engaged with any these.

Reasons why i don't feel Slack is a true alternative to emails is that with emails you can print it out and validate the nature of the conversation (BCC ftw by the way). With Slack, any person can just in time edit the message which can lead to really crazy situations, given they are rare, but still semantics is what makes win argumens sometimes.

UPD: any messaging platform that forbids editing is the closes to what we have with formal converations.

A better question might be "Who are you communicating with?" and then "What are they capable and/or accustomed to using?"

If you're just dealing with other IT industry types, then email may not be for you.

OTOH, if you're dealing with other industries like real-estate agents, lawyers, shopkeepers, etc. (non-IT people and/or non-technology-centric people) then you may find that email and faxes are the way to go.

For personal use very, very little these days.

My step-father often still emails photos but otherwise for most family communication we use Signal (both one to one and we have a few family groups for various things).

For friends it is a mix between Signal and WhatsApp.

For online comms and colab it is about 80% Discord and 20% Slack. Used to be IRC and Usenet but that stopped a few years ago for me.

We’re still pretty heavy email users at work. In fact, my job is mostly email and Teams messages.

In my personal life, I have an email archive dating back to ~2000, which has me wallowing in nostalgia from time to time.

Email still has its place. Sometimes there’s no need for synchronous chat - IM just doesn’t seem the correct medium when typing out ~500+ characters.

Between friends, no. We mostly talk in Discord for random stuff and memes and discussions or text-message groups for people not on discord or when we need more immediate responses. Some friends are still on FB, but that's mostly for large announcements or for friends that particularly need a lot of attention and drama.

Very little. ~95% of my personal email and ~60% of my work email is discarded because I have no interest in the message. IM (Skype, Google Hangouts, Text) is my preferred means of communication. I don't like my real-time being monopolized by voice calls. I rarely answer the phone unless I know who is calling and why.

E-mail remains vital in my view. We use it for most professional communications at the office. We've adopted Teams, but it is mostly only used for things that requires an immediate response (i.e., are you doing x right now, the deadline is in less than an hour).

I prefer email and built my workflow around it. I prefer email to most forms of communication unless it must be real time. I am 44.and work in a large corp. I prefer email when coordinating with outside groups. Email works across organizations.

To communicate with people I actually know? No. Outside of work, I haven't seen a personal email to someone in years.

If someone needs me, text me. Or better yet, text my wife and she'll let me know about it if it's important.

I don’t email friends, and I never have, among my group of friends (aged 28-32) instant messaging (in various forms) was always available.

I send and receive email from businesses and people I have business relationships with.

What are the alternatives to email? I found the emails a life essential thing, also because you can generate your pgp key and store it on your computer without rely to third part service for encryption.

For work, absolutely. It's easy to archive and organize.

For personal use, it's mostly an inbox for receipts and tracking my orders online.

My circle of friends rely on instant-messaging to communicate and plan events.

Yes. It's a pretty good spaz filter. If somebody doesn't have the attention span to read/respond to emails, then I'm probably not going to enjoy working with them.

I've lost useful archives of chats multiple times in switches between incompatible systems: HipChat, Slack, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams.

I have not had this problem with email.

I'm not sure how you can survive without email. It's the standard method for electronic comms. Others will come and go but email will persist.

If anything I've started using it more often. I now try to find emails and send people compliments if I like their work or their websites.

Yes, because it's the one async communication method I know the recipient is going to have no matter where they are in the world.

Other than with one friend in middle school, I’ve never used email socially. It’s been either Facebook, or texting for me.

Yes - work is almost all E-Mail based - on the personal side I lean more toward texting apps....

I work at a small business and we are entirely email based.

Yes. I prefer email than IM or any other medium.

France here.

First, it’s my tool to centralize alerts: Uptime robots, changes in multitude of systems (new release from a provider, …)

Second, communicating outside my startup requires email: Accountant, lawyer, important customers. Going through the customer portal and raising a ticket is insulting for important customers ;) Also, everything which needs to be kept: Salary sheets, warnings/notifications with a legal impact.

Third, everyone despises Facebook so my extended family is 100% communicating through email.

Friends are on Facebook for boomers and Discord for people I constantly interact with. Few friends on Whatsapp, and no business there.

I use email, SMS, phone calls. Nothing else.

It’s worse, we use Teams

Yes.

Yes, I have been using hey.com and it's not perfect but seems better than gmail.

all yur txt r belong to us pwn u melinials

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