Email Is Not SMS (2008) | Hacker News Reader

Email Is Not SMS (2008)

email.is-not-s.ms

32 pointspabs346 comments

In Japan it's customary to first introduce yourself in emails with boilerplate, and then make small talk about the season if its someone you email infrequently, then close with more boilerplate.

The "boilerplate" means you begin every reply in a thread with "This is George Jetson at Spacely Sprockets. Thank you for your patronage." even if it's crystal clear from the From: line who is sending the mail.

The message about the seasons will read something like: "Recently the leaves are showing their first autumn hues. The night temperature may become cold soon, so please take care." This is done only on the first message in a thread.

My company here in Japan uses Slack, and it has done wonders to reduce the amount of boilerplate internally, but you still see it sometimes even on Slack esp. from the older generation.

Whenever I receive an email that is worded like that but is written in my native language it immediately raises a red flag because no one around here communicates that way.

In 99/100 cases the email is spam/phishing attempt.

In Japan, receiving a mail that is NOT like that is a red flag :)

Aha, so that’s why our Japanese partners often start their emails with introducing themselves. Haven’t seen the seasonal boilerplate though.

Yeah, it's really awkward/funny here when global SaaS companies send marketing mails like "Hey ____, Could you use some help with _____?", especially if they are Google Translated to Japanese.

That sounds...nice.

I get really sick of spam messages from account reps that sounds like it could be written by a bot.

Human communication should be for humans. If you want to talk to a robot, don't email me, call our API.

Trust me, it works wonders in corporate US inter company business. I have been a subcontractor and prime, and have it down to an art in about 3 sentences + specifics about the request or response timeline.

Being polite isn’t difficult, with practice, and manners are free. The response turnaround times from subs was noticeably faster for me time and time again than my sterile do-this-list type no time to bother with trying little bits of nice…

I have a FB friend that starts every single one of his FB posts with "Dear Friends..."

(We're both American)

Perhaps the author has not lived in a time, where postal services would have more than one delivery during the day. At its height, postal services in Copenhagen would have up to seven daily deliveries.

My dad recalls in the late 1970s sending a postcard to his then-girlfriend, basically saying 'see you on Thursday'. Text messages replaced these kinds of letters, but the notion text messages dawned a new form of communication is a bit mistaken. It made it more widely available, and over greater distances than before.

Nothing wrong with writing a letter like that (but these days, why would you?), and similarly, nothing wrong with writing an email like that.

This is something that you get a bit of a picture of reading classic Sherlock Holmes stories. Sherlock is always sending and receiving correspondence at a rate that makes no sense to the modern reader, but at that time in London, mail was delivered as frequently as 12 times per day.

There's nothing that gets my eyes to roll harder than someone complaining about how other people choose to use a tool. Mentally filing this one next to the guy who thinks people shouldn't wear sweatpants when working from home.

Of course you shouldn't, briefs only is enough good in my opinion. Save your nice sweatpants for workouts in some public places.

Exactly! Plus, I get a kick out of doing video calls with important people while wearing briefs only. Sometimes wondering whether they do too, just with the upper half of their suit…

Seems like there are a few other things that are not SMS, including SMS itself:

  $ dig is-not-s.ms @sym.noone.org. axfr

  ; <<>> DiG 9.11.5-P4-5.1+deb10u7-Debian <<>> is-not-s.ms @sym.noone.org. axfr
  ;; global options: +cmd
  is-not-s.ms.            86400   IN      SOA     sym.noone.org. hostmaster.noone.org. 2018092900 28800 7200 604800 86400
  is-not-s.ms.            86400   IN      NS      ns4.beckert.ch.
  is-not-s.ms.            86400   IN      NS      sym.noone.org.
  bloggen.is-not-s.ms.    86400   IN      CNAME   sym.noone.org.
  blogging.is-not-s.ms.   86400   IN      CNAME   sym.noone.org.
  changelog.is-not-s.ms.  86400   IN      CNAME   sym.noone.org.
  e-mail.is-not-s.ms.     86400   IN      CNAME   sym.noone.org.
  email.is-not-s.ms.      86400   IN      CNAME   sym.noone.org.
  etherpad.is-not-s.ms.   86400   IN      CNAME   sym.noone.org.
  icq.is-not-s.ms.        86400   IN      CNAME   sym.noone.org.
  im.is-not-s.ms.         86400   IN      CNAME   sym.noone.org.
  irc.is-not-s.ms.        86400   IN      CNAME   sym.noone.org.
  jabber.is-not-s.ms.     86400   IN      CNAME   sym.noone.org.
  sm.is-not-s.ms.         86400   IN      CNAME   sym.noone.org.
  sms.is-not-s.ms.        86400   IN      CNAME   sym.noone.org.
  usenet.is-not-s.ms.     86400   IN      CNAME   sym.noone.org.
  is-not-s.ms.            86400   IN      SOA     sym.noone.org. hostmaster.noone.org. 2018092900 28800 7200 604800 86400
  ;; Query time: 672 msec
  ;; SERVER: 178.63.92.236#53(178.63.92.236)
  ;; WHEN: Sun Aug 28 15:27:12 BST 2022
  ;; XFR size: 17 records (messages 1, bytes 441)

The one that gets me the most is http://irc.is-not-s.ms/. It's instant! It's in the names! It's supposed to mimic verbal, in-person conversation! I would die if every message on libera.chat started with "to whom it may concern: you may not know me, but I am open-parens, a human on Earth who is visiting your chat server. As the autumn approaches and the rain makes puddles on the ground, I've noticed that my Firefox profile gets overwritten everytime I update Arch Linux."

No. The author and the website design are both still in 2002. E-mails should be 1 line, preferably. Also I don't need your 12-line signature and your awesome profile picture.

E-mail is terrible as it is, please don't let me cut through all your clutter before I can read what it's about!

This seems to be a historical doc. Most people don't use email like SMS anymore, since instant messaging walled guardens took over

> Last modified: Wed May 11 21:09:27 2022 by Axel Beckert.

It seems Axel still believes in it!

I'm more on team "Email Is Not HTML" than "Email Is Not SMS". The text information in email is whatever you want it to be. It's fine. But encoding that information as HTML really breaks the functionality of email and opens up all sorts of attack surface (and bugs) for very little gain.

I am fine with hyperlinks and useful inline images/attachments in e-mail. I don't like or want the "web page but over e-mail" but having rich text or hypertext can be very useful.

Agreed. The presence of nontrivial amounts of HTML is a strong sign that the email was sent by a spammer/marketer.

I personally like it when the text is presented as a gif. Especially a gif of cursive scrawl, containing a long URL.

For me the bigger issue is the other way around: SMS is not email. Way too often I get a text from someone asking a question that doesn't need a reply right away, is asking for a detailed answer, and sometimes needs me to bring an additional person or two into the conversation.

But since they sent it as a text message, it's hard to keep track of the need to reply since I can't mark it as unread, a long answer is cumbersome to give, and transitioning to a group message is tedious and loses the conversation history.

My favorite is the text message that you describe, then many dozens more text messages about different topics. So then I need to either jump on converting the text to an e-mail right away or make sure I remember it and then try to find the text later.

In both cases it is extra effort and cognitive load for me because someone didn't consider the medium. So by favorite thing I mean the opposite. I really hate when other people do t give any thought to the medium/context of a message.

Nothing I hate more than rambling emails. Please cut to the chase and tell me what you need it's easier for you, and easier for me! :)

Agreed. Brevity.

USING ALL CAPS IS MORE BRIEF FOR THE WRITER AND READER THAN CAPITALISATION OR EVEN PUNCTUATION. BREVITY FOR WHO?

Email is also not mail. And regardless, it’s just a communication medium, and you can use that medium any way you’d like.

The medium is the message.

It might be this sentiment -- that emails should be like letters, with a greeting, ending, signature, etc -- that pushes all communication to more "SMS-like" media. We even get support from companies over DMs.

I personally use email like SMS. I might say "Hi" on the first email, and might end with my name if we never chatted before, but otherwise, straight to the point.

At work we are encouraged to use slack for everything, including contacting HR. It's true it gets you a faster response. But it's unreliable when it comes to future retrieval.

I still make it a point to write an email for any important communication that I want to document, even if I have to ping HR or the other party on slack right after.

>we are encouraged to use slack for everything, including contacting HR

That might be deliberate. They can use slack features to turn off saving revisions of edited messages, to make retention times short, etc. That is, discoverable evidence of any wrongdoing goes *poof* easily.

Compare to email, where you can forward some answer from HR to your personal email, with headers that later give some viable evidence you really got some specific answer, when you got it, etc. More useful than screenshots of slack, for example.

Interesting you mention this as Slack was originally an acronym: Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge

Point is that it was intended as a communication stream that is recorded and indexed, so you don't need a wiki/sharepoint/notion/etc. for example. It doesn't seem to work like in practice, though

This is a commonly-held misconception. "Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge" was a backronym[0] - an acronym formed from an already existing word.

[0] https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/875563691172691969

I just have an “awaiting response” bucket for my tasks. So if someone fucks with my progress they get notified asap.

Huh. I thought the "article" would be about how too many platforms/systems send 2FA auth codes via email (or allow the option) and not SMS. Email is easily accessible anywhere, it doesn't truly fulfill "having something" like having a "phone" (yes, I know SMS codes are sent to a phone number which can also be forwarded) so if someone has hacked my email and has access to my email then your 2FA is crap. (Yes, I know 2FA shouldn't be used over SMS either, but it's better than nothing, no?)

Things like iMessage and Google Messages for Web mean SMS doesn't really fit the bill, either.

> Take the time and write all E-mail messages like real letters: write what you want to express; keep an eye on style, language and grammar; do not forget punctuation or salutation.

For me a salutation is kind of extra because my emails is like a comment for a commit in VCS. Nobody writes "Hello Teamlead, I have fixed a bug, here is a code, best wishes from Developer. Maybe email is not sms but it is not a physical letter being delivered days along as well.

Ok. You made your preferences into a website which is cool I guess.

I have much more of a problem with gigantic HTML signatures.

This person is from a different generation and doesn't realize that everyone else doesn't want to be writing letters. Considering the author also wants IRC to be written ilke a letter this may just be a joke.

Kinda off topic, but what do people think of the uros like this one? I have for example pvinis.com and pvin.is but I don't know which one is easier for others to use/remember/read..

Blame Canada for this in the big picture. Hear me out…

Once Sales and Super Duper On the Go Executives got ahold of the BlackBerry with its decent screen and quite capable keyboard and scroll ball…communication was bound to change. See, they’re too busy and important to read or write long things.

You expect them to scroll down like 7 times for a 3 sentence full paragraph? Odds looking dim.

I learned to play telegraph in my communications. Me and purpose, stop. What I need, stop. Confirm and give timeline, stop.

Once that crew gets ahold of anything productive and capable of being dumbed down a few notches and dressed up by a sociopath in a turtleneck, well, there’s your answer fish bulb!

This reminds me of my idea about Google's missed opportunity in messaging. They had billions in a captive audience for gmail - all they had to do was figure a way to make the Subject field in SMTP optional, and bam! they'd have a killer messaging app (probably circa 2008 when this page was written). For a short message you don't want to have to decide a subject, as well as write the message itself.

Instead they've languished launching 4 dozen messaging apps.

And websites shouldn't be used for a couple paragraphs of a message.

Related: England expects that every man will do his duty.

not bad, but I would like to add to that, never use html for emails and wrap lines to less than say 70 characters

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