It is time to ban email

And replace it with....

Email is a neutral protocol, in a natural monopoly, very hard to replace unless you want to choose a state sanctioned monopoly like you would to Facebook's Whatsapp or Apple's messenger.

This sounds like fatalistic throwing the baby with the bath water, I know that there's a fine line between operator's error and bad system design, but when a piece of technology has been stable for 40 years, and there is a fuck up, you can't reaally blame it on the tech.

If there's really sensitive info like informants or HIV patients, maybe implement some serious access controls so that not even operators have access to that sensitive info.

Most of the issues discussed are problems with email software and not the protocol. Attachments should (probably) not be included by default in reply messages. Reply to a message with multiple recipients should ask clarification to reply to sender or the group (or have a selectable default). BCC should somehow be preferred to CC - Maybe CC should be "group email"

Funny, I had a conversation just yesterday where someone was saying they joined a new company expecting to use collaborative documents for spec documents, technical proposals, etc. This is, btw, a very large company that makes many $B selling a SaaS for collaborative documents. They were surprised to find that everyone instead emailed copies of the spec around, expecting people to make individual comments in the doc and email it back, as if it was 2001.

It turns out that in [this part of] this company, collaborative documents go against the actual desires of the document author. They want to be able to accept comment/edits from an individual privately, say "thank you for your input", and completely ignore them. If the comments are public for all to see, they can't do that!

Strangely, private comments are not a feature of the SaaS product, despite this failure of internal product-market fit.

Can we not just throw out the last widespread open communication protocol with the bath water?

UI of email has stagnated or regressed because big companies don't benefit from improving it. They prefer to lock you into incompatible messaging platforms (Slack, Telegram, Discord, Teams, ...) where email UI could easily be adapted to have similar interfaces in many cases.

Email is one of the best communication protocols humanity has ever invented.

Do you want to give Meta the keys to all your communications? Or Slack, who sends them off to AI training models?

Email's a unique protocol because it's structured fundamentally differently than every other messaging protocol/app. It's focused on sending documents around, which are individual and have no external context. This is unlike most messaging apps which are chat focused: the base unit of interaction is the chat thread/channel/DM/whatever, not the individual chat message. Email's not really good for chat. You can have replies and stuff, and you can have threads, but because each email is independent and threads are made up of ad hoc links between messages, if one message forgets to include threading or reply metadata then the thread is broken. Modern messaging apps have a first-class concept of a thread or channel that messages belong to, which makes breaking conversations much more difficult. At the same time though, not everything needs to be a conversation. If I get a weekly newsletter, I think of it more as an individual document than a message in a conversation. If Amazon tells me my order is shipped, it doesn't really have any relation with the other times they've told me an order has shipped, so it doesn't really belong in the same thread of conversation

So many articles I read about "email needs to go" don't understand that messaging apps/protocols are conversation-based, while email is document-based, and that the latter model does have its benefits and should be retained. Yes, whatever replaces email needs to be federated and open instead of closed off like Discord or Twitter or whatever, but that's in addition to the fact that it needs to be document-based as well

The problems described here seem like they could be solved by email clients, rather than abandoning the whole protocol.

> Will the youth of today see sending an email as ridiculously old-fashioned as a paper telegram or a landline?

They already do.

Email is the worst form of communication. Except, all others are even worse.

Unless and until there's a suitable alternative, you can pry emails from my cold dead fingers.

A lot of businesses view human errors that a system has as something to complain at the users about and put policy around to stop it from happening, this does not work. Equally banning an essential technology doesn't solve the problem because people still need a mechanism for sending messages asynchronously to each other.

The issue is about the user interface of the clients. The problem with email is that no one really makes any money out of it. Its a mature and stagnant technology and it gets little investment. People want to pay as little as possible for something that you can get from Google for "free". But the issues are all to do with the user interface and defending people from relatively rare errors because people misclicked and misunderstood the impact.There are very common features of email that should be nice and quick and there are features rarely used that cause a lot of problems and the happy path should be slowed and made more difficult to do accidentally and without knowledge of the potential impact.

But the issue is the maturity and lack of investment because otherwise these problem features like CC would be handled better and there are numerous ways it could be made safer and errors a lot less likely.

Email is one of the few protocols that was designed out of the box to be decentralized, that in the mean time is implemented by a lot of big tech players and that has stayed compatible for communication between accounts at one of those big tech players. And that is also the reason it won't disappear soon.

And aside from that, what the article mentioned is human error. And honestly, I do not think that other online communication protocols will eliminate human errors.

So cc and bcc are the stake in the heart of email, but let's keep sending love notes to the hamburger icon and every other inscrutable piece of dumb junk of which people seem to be able to make sense.

You could argue the same for car driving or financials or any craft...

Leave the protocol alone and use Delta Chat: https://delta.chat/en/

> When was the last time you used carbon paper to make a copy? Have you ever dictated to your secretary who a memorandum should be blind-copied to?

When was the last time you filed a document in a physical folder? Or used a physical clipboard? Have you ever found a physical bug in your computer?

These are all concepts that were once common in the real world, adopted to make computing more familiar and approachable. Whether the physical concepts are still in use is irrelevant. What matters is if the technology is useful, and email most certainly is. Claiming it should banned because some people misuse it is asinine. If anything should be banned because of misuse then it's surely social media, which is actually harmful to society.

well, that was a waste of 3 minutes

Sure let's dump email in favor of a new non-proprietary, open standards, decentralized and non-commercial protocol. Name one If you like.

> Disney's slack enters the room

$foo considered harmful

We'd be way better off banning the asocial media corporate platforms.

Or maybe, just ban bull shit blag posts like this one?

Another advantage of email that the author doesn't mention is the ability to host one's own email. For actual persons and corporate entities.

Of course this would also be so uncool for the hip kids. All we _really_ need are 15 sec videos highlighting the twerk tik "set your balls on fire challenge".

It's funny, right?

Just another example of why I'm so grateful to not have grown up in the internet brain damage era...

The consequences are, sadly, irreversible. The individuals with this condition will likely never recover. It's like starting to give kids cigarettes at age 5, and then expect them to quit on their own in their 20s and 30s. Just not gonna happen. The only hope is for the new generations to have some kids and raise them differently.

I for one am in favor of leaving the protocol alone and using Delta Chat: https://delta.chat/en/

Ban x because some people, who would undoubtedly struggle with y, struggle with x. Idiotic article.

Bluesky post quoted by TFA: "Friendly reminder to use literally anything other than email if you need to have a conversation between multiple people that you have any hope in following."

Are we backflipping from "this meeting could have been an email" to "this email (thread) could have been a meeting"?

you'll have to pry it from my cold dead hands dipshit. one of the last remaining protocols that you can a) self-host, and b) reach anybody with, and this person wants to ban it.