Comment by bborud | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bborud | Hacker News Reader

I have come to hate email so much there are weeks where I will check my email perhaps just once or twice in a week. Every 2-3 months I try to clean up my inbox by going through it and unsubscribing to all the rubbish I am opted into without my say-so. But since we use Gmail, this is a really, really, really slow process. Gmail is a terrible product that has no evolved meaningfully over the 20 or so years it has existed. And it doesn't get any better when idiot product managers feel it is more important to add more AI nonsense than try to fix a product that is very poor at doing the thing it is supposed to do.

(If anyone knows of a tool that helps me rapidly clean up my gmail, please let me know).

But the worst thing about email is that nobody knows how to write emails anymore. Everyone just quotes the while thing and adds their comments on top. People no longer trim down the email and intersperse their comments throughout the response. Mail reading software no longer aids you in doing this - cleaning up the quoting for you (not that many mail readers did this before).

And when you don't want to quote the email you are responding to, people include the whole mess anyway and just pop their response at the top. Rather than understanding that a threaded mail reader (as most mail readers are today) will provide the reader with the context they need just fine. There's no need to repeat dozens of older responses.

I miss email from 25-30 years ago. When 90% of what landed in my inbox was actually for me, written by other human beings. Most of which knew how to produce a response to an email without it just being a sloppy mess.

I wish people who wrote mail clients were more intelligent product designers and more thoughtful people. That they would understand that catering to people's poor habits was, and is, a bad idea and that a better idea would have been to make proper email quoting at least a path of considerably less resistance.

> nobody knows how to write emails anymore

I think the problem is bigger than that, nobody knows how to write anymore. In the past, people wrote in handwriting ('cursive' in America) on plain paper (with no guide lines) and with a fountain pen. We didn't keep what they put in the bin, so there is some survivor bias, however, when I look at letters my ancestors wrote, I am amazed at how few corrections there are.

As I understand it, we have two thinking modes, there is the quick thinking by reaction and then there is the more convoluted 'slow' thinking where we use logic and reason. I am not convinced that too many of us have the skill of putting 'slow thinking' into written words, or the desire to put complicated ideas to paper.

So, what changed?

SMS and Twitter did have a text limit of 140 characters. This was not good if you need 140 characters just to introduce what you have to say, however, it didn't take long for people to adjust. Spelling was no longer important, neither was punctuation or sentence structure.

Soon this 'communication with grunts' replaced eloquence, and we degraded our collective literacy. Nowadays you can't write beautiful emails to people as it is a bit of an imposition, you have spent maybe hours crafting words, they only have seconds to respond due to the all-pervasive 'busy lives' excuse, and they definitely don't have the ten minutes it takes to read your carefully written words. Hence, writing in full just means you get ghosted at best.

Clearly there are more books being written than ever. School assignments also get done, same with work-related documents. However, the craft of writing has become even more professionalised, even though everyone can open some type of word processor, pick up a dictionary and write something awesome without having to get the old fountain pen out.

As for the post, what if I was the son of the author, and I had to tidy up his affairs after some tragic accident? All of those emails would be gone, lost to posterity and only the emails from the bank read (because money). All of that obsession on having every email organised for the last four decades would be for nothing, outside of the mind of the author.

Most people used to be illiterate a few generations ago and then only had a handful of books in the house, like the Bible and some other staples, and their letters were full of spelling mistakes, and clumsy writing and bad letter shapes. This is also seen in reddit translation requests of postcards and letters.

Your impression is based on immense selection bias. Maybe your ancestors were in the top percentiles, nobles, aristocrats, or even just doctors, academics and priests. But up until the early 20th century the vast majority were farmers and then they were factory workers.

Great writing and abundant reading was always very niche.

Selection bias means that we don't have the sheer volume of printed material that there once was, as in pulp fiction novels, not to mention the newspapers and magazines that used to be in such abundance.

Where you lived made a difference. A rural Catholic area was not what you wanted. In the city with protestant ethics, things were a little different, more than one book was permitted.

Fortunately there is a lack of aristocracy in my known ancestry, so factory workers over the last century, and reading was the thing for them, including all of the difficult books, even though none of them had much in the way of education, just basic schooling and working for Ford in ye olde factory.

Agreed that before the 1900s there were literacy issues. However, empire has always needed vast armies of clerks and record keepers, so literacy has always been important, just not for everyone.

> (If anyone knows of a tool that helps me rapidly clean up my gmail, please let me know).

I’ve used Leave Me Alone (leavemealone.com) for cleaning up my subscriptions. It scans your past messages for subscriptions, sorts them by most frequent messages, and allows to unsubscribe (and delete) with one click. It’s a nice tool for this purpose.

There are various tools to mass unsubscribe. Gmail also recently added the option to surface your subscriptions and unsubscribe. Gmail added the various email categories too.

You can get back to the world you dream of. Every email I receive into my inbox is an email I want to receive :)

You might also like superhuman.com and similar.

Huh I never thought about the quoting thing. I'm definitely gonna clear out the auto quoted bits in my replies from now one.

Dissecting their email and interspersing your response, especially if expressing some disagreement, can come across as passive aggressive nitpicking, instead of taking in the whole message and charitable interpreting the entire intended message.

Not saying that it is meant that way, but I know many take it that way.

if i write specific questions and people reply in totality i find that offensive and manipulative

(adding another point of view)

ultimately no way not to offend people who are dying to be offended

I agree, this is context dependent. If the email clearly touches upon multiple topics and is separated into several questions, it can be better to answer point by point. Still, to me, ripping my message apart and inserting the comments feels a bit off, as if you were my prof or teacher grading and commenting and critiquing my paper.

Of course, answering inplace makes it harder to weasel out of answering some of the points. In that sense it's more honest and straightforward to write it inbetween.

> ultimately no way not to offend people who are dying to be offended

This is absolutely true. One should not assume too much based on small things like this, assume good intentions until clearly proven otherwise instead of reacting to minor "clues" and "signs". But on the other hand when producing text, it's also good to know how they are culturally interpreted around you. You can say all that is a "you problem" but I don't think that thinking leads to a good life.

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