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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

Email has already largely become a newsletter and notification distribution system. Average people don't write or read emails anymore outside of some work settings but even then its usually Slack or MS Teams.

Technology and people move quickly so fossilized systems such as email get left behind. There is too much friction to improve a system which has a large number of different implementations. Where any change is hotly debated and people still resist features added to email over a decade ago. Naturally the proprietary systems win when they can roll out a new feature and have it universally work on day one.

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> Average people don't write or read emails anymore outside of some work settings but even then its usually Slack or MS Teams.

Do others believe/experience this?

I ask because this sounds like a very Bay Area comment.

I'm Australian and have worked for a variety of companies and its been over a year since someone internal at the company sent me a non broadcast newsletter email. Email is much like SMS these days, you use it to arrange job interviews or talk occasionally between businesses but you would never email someone you know directly.

Do you mind if I ask how many employees (order of magnitude) these companies have. Eg 100, 1000, 10000, etc.

Previous was 50, current is 500. All communication is over MS Teams now.

I'm Australian and have the direct counter experience. Most of the business I've worked for consider Slack as ephermal.

Email is for significant communications.

Outside of work, I'm using daily for things like booking bands, talking to strata, etc.

While email in a lot of large companies might tend to be becoming a one-way distribution system; it is still vibrant and heavily used in smaller enterprises.

How do companies that don’t use email keep track of long standing communications? Stuff that isn’t resolved within days but may take weeks, months, or even years to be resolved?

And that’s just internally. How do you handle stuff that also requires external contributors?

Jira and Wiki pages. A problem spanning months to years does not belong in email but somewhere public where people can join and leave the company without breaking the knowledge.

Jira can send emails too.

Ah yeah wikipages...where you have to mail the url that someone finds the right page....

> you would never email someone you know directly.

Across countries everyone uses a different messenger app. For some whatsapp, other LINE, etc. Email is faster to make sure you reach them all.

That sounds right to me. Academia is run on email.

I work in the r&d lab of a major testing/instruments manufacturer (I'm in AI but I work with engineers with expertise in radar, phased arrays, wave physics, FPGAs... so not really "SF tech"). Yet even here it seems like everyone is moving heavily towards just using teams. Now that I think about it, we only really use email when we deal with HR or to accept invitations to meetings (on teams).

In my experience this is ridiculously far off. I know that pretty much all universities still communicate through email, organisations like the IEEE as well, but more importantly how does the OP think companies communicate with external suppliers, candidates etc?

> Do others believe/experience this?

I don't think many companies operate this way. Any formal things, e.g. regulation, finance, HR, will likely use email much more. And talking to a third party company, which some people will talk to 200 of in a year, will all be email, at least to start with.

That is really a scary comment I agree. Apparently according to the user using paid private services have replaced email functionality.

Side Note: My wife's work went all in on MS Teams. They held multiple trainings and kept showing how it could handle all the functionality of email. You could schedule appointments and even share file..... Six months later everyone still uses email and MS Teams is barely used at all.... email just works.

From my end it looks like the "no one uses email anymore" is just marketing hype.

I write emails, usually long form (several paragraphs). And of course, I read emails too. I don't use any chat apps, nor Slack nor Teams. I regret the tendency of chat apps to integrate email; the result is that my correspondents tend to reply to my considered emails with "LOL <smiley>" or something like that.

The IMAP spec is poor; it's ambiguous and unclear. The only way to build a reliable client is to test interworking against as many IMAP servers as you can find. A better protocol would be a good thing.

The SMTP spec is NOT poor. There's no need to replace SMTP. It works fine.

It's some time since I read an explanation of JMAP (with the article doesn't provide). As far as I'm aware, it provides roughly the same service, but using HTTP and JSON. I'm not a supporter of the "replace everything with JSON" movement; I don't see the point.

I'm not that keen on the "replace everything with HTTP" movement either; if you piggy-back your new protocol on an existing protocol, there's a risk that your new application will start dragging the underlying standard along with it, to the detriment of the original application the underlying protocol was designed for. I.e., it would be regrettable if JMAP resulted in pressure on the HTTP standard to start including features motivated by the requirements of mail retrieval.

> Do others believe/experience this?

No. This doesn't even come close to representing my real-world experience.

I mostly use email for sending invoices.

This is not the case. One of my jobs is taking funerals, which means that I meet a random selection of the population, of all social classes. This includes people down to about 20 years old, not just the older relatives you might expect. The only people I meet who do not use email are a minority of people over 80 years old (perhaps 3% of my total contacts), and pretty obviously they are not using the more recent proprietary platforms either. Sometimes clients will use messaging for something short like an update on the time of a meeting, and occasionally they might use Teams or Skype for meetings rather than face to face, but the two great constants are voice telephone calls and email.

I think you may have become bubbled.

>fossilized systems

What a weird way to call a technologically superior solution.

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