I have explicitly told my coworkers - all of them - to reach me exclusively on Microsoft Teams; because my Outlook ‘inbox’ is so consistently full of garbage that I’d say about 1/40 messages are actually relevant to me.
Email is a problem that needs to be solved. I could never - do never - blame anyone for not answering an email.
The joy of synchronous communication is that it is also asynchronous. If you didn’t get my Teams message at the time - you will after!
Email offers no benefits I can see compared to instant messaging. Plus, you can always turn off notifications. I also don’t need to make filters to drown out the massive amount of sheer noise and unrelated garbage.
When someone sends me a direct message on Teams, I know that’s a real person, asking for me directly.
I have never had a Teams notification, at my current workplace of 3+ years - sent to me by a robot. Imagine that!
In contrast - least 90% of the email sent to ‘me’ from within my company is not from a real person. I’d say 98% of email - not exaggerating whatsoever - is completely unrelated to me, or effectively ‘corporate spam’.
What benefit does email provide above a service like Teams, and how does it curtail all of the above issues?
By requesting people use email exclusively to reach you; you’re choosing to inconvenience me, and many others - because you’ve refused to move on to the next logical step in communicating with your coworkers. You’re forcing me to use a service to communicate with others that is ineffective at best - frustrating at hell at worst.
It appears entitled, and; frankly, you’re the type of person I’d hate working with because of it.
An email sent to me is a fish in a bucket of mostly fake fish.
An IM sent to me is a direct message, sent by a human; specially to me - and if I don’t see it when it’s sent to me - I can still see it later.
Email, like the telephone, is polluted into uselessness.
I wonder if Gmail is part of the problem. All the spam I receive at a Fastmail-hosted account is coming from hacked Gmail accounts. Google is doing nothing to stop it, even though a very simple filter at my end can automatically flag it. Gmail's outgoing mail servers are getting reported into blocklist reputation oblivion in recent weeks - could be worth switching to a paid provider.
The spam I'm talking about almost always has "new autobot" or "new cryptobot" in the subject, and usually has an infected PDF attached. A simple outbound check for that would be enough to flag likely compromised accounts. That's the simple filter rule I'm using to kick it automatically into my spam folder for later review.
One of the more egregious servers is mail-lf1-f48.google.com:
https://www.abuseipdb.com/check/209.85.167.48
But it's also coming from mail-yw1-f180.google.com, mail-yw1-f181.google.com and mail-yw1-f182.google.com, and those are just the servers I've seen in the last 24 hours.
https://www.abuseipdb.com/check/209.85.128.180
https://www.abuseipdb.com/check/209.85.128.181
https://www.abuseipdb.com/check/209.85.128.182
I am assuming it is the Google accounts that are compromised, and not Google's own mail servers. But I suppose it's possible that Google itself is pwned.
A manager had been emailing me monthly requests to update some time-tracking excel sheet, but his emails looked like the kind of automated spam you get from every other service reminding you to do something or other so I ignored them. And I was tracking my time following a different process (you had to do both unbeknownst to me) so I assumed it was just an automatic reminder and I was good.
Anyway 6 months into the job he called me on the phone and gave me the dressing down of a lifetime about responsibility and answering your emails and so forth. Very unpleasant experience all around.