Ask HN: Whose business operates without email?
Rant:
I'm sick of email. It's become the "universal inbox". We never predicted just how awful that would be. Let me count the ways...
Chat. Email has become live chat, despite more suitable platforms existing. I first saw this with Blackberry, but this is now prevalent in white-collar industries. People expect rapid responses. This is hugely detrimetal to morale and work-life balance.
Fire-and-forget. Optional bonus: workload shuffling. We all send emails like "Here's X, let me know if/when Y" and tick-off a todo item. But this is emblematic of a terrible workflow: get it off my desk ASAP and off-load responsibility to someone else. Inevitably this multiplies someone else's workload and encourages short-termism. The individual looks productive to management, since their throughput is high, but they're contributing to a pervasive syrup which clogs the business and lowers morale.
Work multiplier. You get am email from a superior: "I can't find X, please send". You know X is in their mail archive/shared drive because you sent it to them/put it there, but their inability to find it means extra work for you. (Yes, this problem exists outside email, but email is a major force-magnifier here.) When you receive the email "Here's X, let me know if/when Y", how do you handle it? Pin it, flag it, put a note in the calendar for the date, identify what Y involves, and... fire off a few emails?
Workflow management. Sure, "inbox zero", "GTD", etc, but there are an infinite number of ways individuals actually manage their work via email. Large orgs train staff how to "effectively use email", inevitably involving poorly thought out workflows which favour certain types of individual and leaves no room for others. Email gets mangled to fit ad-hoc solutions, and the solutions are perennially updated to deal with shortcomings. It's a vicious circle.
Knowledge base. Enabled by ubiquitous search, knowledge is dumped into email. This seems reasonable, but I've experienced real issues with this. Email is managed differently from knowledge bases. I had to move depts within an org once, entailing a change in email address, and hence account. The IT dept could not guarantee that I would retain access to my email archive. Yikes!
Audit trail. Like the knowledge base, but more personal. Who did what, when. Weaponised during one-to-ones and meetings with HR.
Magic. Email functionality is tightly entwined with calendaring and more. If I delete the email, will the calendar item be cancelled? If I cancel a meeting, will everyone get an email? Why can some people see the Teams button but some can't? Why do some emails in Gmail offer to track a delivery, add to calendar, etc? I want colleagues to understand what's going on, but nobody is confident how these things operate. It's all magic.
Silos. Self-hosting email has become non-trivial, see HN conversations passim [0]. The incumbents (Gmail, Outlook, Mailgun, Sendgrid, etc etc) effectively determine what constiutes spam, making it risky to use anyone other than the major operators. The silos don't always interoperate well; hence "magic". Silo providers are also keen to exploit data, with obvious concerns for privacy.
Privacy. Plenty on this elsewhere. Silo providers read your emails, calendars, documents, etc etc. Yuck.
Identity. Email is synonymous with online identity, despite being unencrypted, non-private, and riddled with other design features which make it orthogonal to identity provision.
To pre-empt, a lot of these problems would exist without email. I'm still interested in how you'd cope with these issues if email ceased to exist. Perhaps email is simply "surfacing" the real, underlying issues.
Edit: perhaps external comms will always require email e.g. with Governments and service providers. If so, is it possible to get rid of email for internal comms?
Thanks all :)
[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=self-hosted%20email