I love email (2023) | Hacker News Reader

I love email (2023)

blog.xoria.org

104 pointssurprisetalk52 comments

I once was let go from a job because of something related to email. It's almost comical, although I didn't feel that way when it actually happened.

I was basically working independently on a teaching task. But there was one coworker who had been there for a long time and was working more in outreach. She told me to install four(!) different instant messaging apps -- which I didn't do because while her job involved a lot of communicating with third parties, mine didn't. Besides, she was not my boss (formally - although I think she thought she kinda was. In any event, she did have a lot of influence on my actual supervisor.)

She insisted that that's mandatory for me to which I countered that the whole professional world works on email just fine, as far as non-internal communication is concerned. She started screaming at me in my own office how I had betrayed her by agreeing to install the apps but then didn't do it. I didn't think I agreed because I found the idea ridiculous from the get go. Anyway - I stayed calm and said we should talk again when she was calmer, too.

I later found out that she then schemed behind my back to have me laid off. Which obviously worked.

I must have really rubbed her the wrong way. But in retrospect, I'm really happy to have moved on to better places since.

I want to say you dodged a bullet but subjectively it sounds more like a missile detonated in your face. Jeez!

I like that email respects the time of both parties. Either can reply when convenient. When a reply requires careful consideration or phrasing you have the time to do so. When you are otherwise engaged you don’t have to stop and handle each one now. When you need to reference it later it is often much easier than finding a chat. It’s almost the only relaxing comms method left apart from mailing a letter.

This is where it's nice to have a client that edits raw messages. Such as mutt. Then you can edit Subject lines to have better search terms.

One of the reasons I like mutt is that I can easily edit the “From:” header (I have Postfix configured with multiple email aliases for my primary email account).

In my experience, most mail user agents allow editing the Subject header. Even Outlook Web Application that I have to use in work allows me to change the Subject line when a conversation thread has veered off-topic, e.g., “Server replacement [was: Windows 11 upgrades of client PCs in Accounts]“

Oh but I don't mean edit the Subject in new replies. I mean edit it in an email already/currently in the Inbox.

Ah, OK. That’s very cool. I hadn’t realise that was possible. I might have to borrow that technique. Thanks!

I've done that the past couple of years two handfuls of times. Mostly to people I discovered on HN, with a nice hardware or software project. Only once did I get a nasty reply (probably because I was too much in my enthusiasm), so I'll remember you, you Italian prick. ;)

Most replies are very nice. People really feel seen and appreciated when I compliment them on their cool project and nice write up.

Even if no one replies, I would still send the occasional email, because I want independent websites/blogs to thrive and stay.

> But I’ve found there’s something magical about email as a medium of communication, and as a technology.

Reminds me of [0]

I love email and postcards. It's a bummer that the signal to noise ratio is so high with junk mail, but that makes genuine correspondence even more special. Long replies make you sit with someone else's perspective without interrupting longer than you would in normal conversation and I think that changes things dramatically.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

I find that Gmail with tabs and filters honestly works pretty well. I find the (few) things that end up in my Primary tab are mostly things that I want to see. I keep my eye on Updates because there are sometimes, umm, updates that I want to know about like changes to travel schedules.

The thing I really dislike are brands using a phone number to let you know about sales etc. No, I don't actually need a new carpet this week.

We have Slack Connect channels with all of our customers (we're a small company), and I've since grown to hate it. At first, it seems like a quick way to have comms with customers, but then you realize it's a quick way to have comms with customers...

Because Slack is so frictionless, there was no barrier asking anything, including questions that were answered the day prior in the main channel or questions that are right in our searchable API docs. It also allows anyone to message, which also seems nice on the surface, but again, it ends up being awful.

Another example is that one of our customer's CS folks Slacks us their questions about their internal system, which we obviously have nothing to do with. This has been consistently like once a month for 2.5 years...

Email adds friction. Even though it's not much, I've found that customers of ours that used to be very bad signal to noise ratio who we've transitioned to email support have since reached out less with more valid support requests.

Customers that always preferred email over Slack were always like that. I assume that's actually because they're bigger companies that are waiting on five internal meetings before doing anything.

I really like Slack of internal communication, but email for external all the way.

I love the idea of emailing people with appreciation for things they've created.

I've considered doing this a few times, but have to admit I've never actually got round to sending people appreciative emails, maybe this blog post is the prompt I need.

There's a lot of makers on HN, has anyone here ever received emails about things they made?

I used to be fairly active on r/generative, someone once DM'd me to show me a pen-plot they'd made based off of something I'd made, and it made my whole week.

I've had a few emails, and a few contacts over Matrix over the years. Barely any though. My email and matrix id are both on my front page at https://www.grepular.com. I recently added a "Like" button at various places throughout the site, front page, end of articles etc, so a click, followed by typing an optional message and another click is all it would take. I've been wondering if people ignore it due to assuming it is somehow connected to social media.

> My email and matrix id are both on my front page at https://www.grepular.com

I've been tempted to put my email address directly on my personal site but just assumed I'd be flooded with automated spam. How have you found it?

I sort of need public contact info. Maybe I obfuscate a bit on my site though I would need to look. Modern hosted email systems seem pretty good at filtering the real spam.

But I also need to coordinate with folks with respect to conference meetings and the like so my email is pretty public.

I host my own email. I use a default SpamAssassin configuration along with some basic greylisting. I barely get any spam. Maybe one every month or two.

Nice, I might try it myself so, thank you!

I have a direct mailto: link to my email address in the footer of my website. Zero obfuscation. I don't get any unusually large volume of spam. Maybe Fastmail's filters are that good, or maybe scraping emails off the web just isn't worth the spammers' time anymore and they've all moved on to posting thirst traps on Instagram. I dunno. Hasn't been a problem either way.

not OP, but my current solution is to have a link which says "click to show email", with javascript handler that changes that link's href (and text) to email address, which is somehow computed. For example, by taking page URL and performing some regexp on it. It both avoids storing email in page source in plain text and requires human interaction, so feels good enough.

Another way I've seen elsewhere is to use a human-language explanation of how to build email address, something like this: "To get my email address, combine my first name (John) with my birth year (2000), separated by dash (-), and add email provider (@gmail.com)".

> my current solution is to have a link which says "click to show email"

Yeah was thinking of going down that route, but I like the simplicity of just having it there there as a mailto link when you land. Based on Mike's response I might try it!

I've never received an email like that but I send them pretty often, the worst thing that can happen is they don't respond. Go for it!

I had one email that I thought was praise, but it was just the poster selling his own tool that did the same thing, but for a monthly fee =)

I've had two or three articles I've written on my blog hit the HN front page, and each time I get one or two emails from some random person about it. It's great. A little connection that some human out there read a thing I wrote and it meant enough to them to write something back to me. I put my email on my stuff because I'm happy for people to use it :)

I used to feel apprehensive about emailing people until one day I just decided to power through and do it. I agree with the post, it's like you unlock an additional layer of communications. Everyone is suddenly contactable! I would also say that most poeple are really nice 1-1, I cannot remember a nasty reply (worst that happened to me was just my email being left ignored).

I would add that I love emails when they are written as emails (i.e. at least one coherent paragraph).

Email, as a medium, prompts us to think (at least for a few seconds), not "generate human tokens". Sure, we may feel being "communicative" or "productive" while chatting or Slack, but (in my experience) it is not always the case.

The enthusiasm described by the author feels familiar! Every once in a while I send emails to 'random' people without expecting too much. During covid I emailed a C64 developer why a certain enemy type from one of his games in 1986 had a certain name. He responded a few days later with a lengthy and in-depth explanation.

Last week I saw and photographed a sticker with street art near my office. I tried tracking down the artist (he was from a neighboring country), found him and tried to find some contact info. I emailed him if he knew how his art reached my city. He answered that the art piece on the sticker was something he created 30 years ago for a festival and that - apparently - an unknown person made stickers using his art.

Sending a short email does not take a lot of time, but it's very rewarding when the other party answers.

I emailed Ken Thompson and Noam Chomsky in the past, and they replied! It probably wouldn’t work any other way.

Emailing Richard Stallman is always an adventure

I email him often enough that I sometimes worry I annoy him (not that often, once or twice a month or so. always interesting to pick his brain on whatever topic and despite my worries, knowing him I doubt he minds)

I once emailed Douglas Hofstadter with some of my own ideas after reading his book (GEB) and he actually responded with a long reply.

I did write to him some weeks ago after reading GEB! Didn't get a reply, but also, I don't expect to. I just hope he reads the praise :)

I'm glad I'm not the only one! I, too, have been emailing creators, randomly, to thank them for their work. Especially when I feature their work in my newsletter.

currently working on a blog for my friends that they can update by sending it an email

i've been administering a couple personal servers by email as well; they each run a small LLM and read emails sent to them, with a strict allowlist they can handle quite a lot of basic tasks: i've locked myself out of ssh from this ip please unban it, please email me when security logs are strange, what is the current status of the services on your server, etc.

Cool idea

Email as a technology is insanely crufty.

It feels somewhat hacked together (because, largely, it is); and there are significantly more bots than people using it (which is somewhat self-fulfilling).

But when I read the leaked/disclosed emails from founders during tech's boom in the late 00-s and early 10-s, I'm left feeling like: this is kinda nice.

You don't need to write long prose, email chains are reasonably self-contained, can include practically anyone and since nobody seems to have a total dominance on mail clients; they pretty much stick to the lowest common denominator. (though, HTML seems to be very much accepted behaviour for email clients, even though it was NOT when I grew up).

So, in the end, it's the safest medium to reach the most people, and incidentally it's also the most "comfy" in that I can optimise my own experience of email if I want to. Nobody cares if you use outlook/gmail/thunderbird/mutt or whatever. It's just email.

This is a pretty strong contrast to the modern web which pretty much requires Chrome or modern messengers which require/enforce their own first-party clients. Even if they happen to support federation (like Teams) which isn't a given.

> Nobody cares if you use outlook/gmail/thunderbird/mutt or whatever. It's just email.

Sadly my company decided the Gmail web interface was the only approved way to access email and blocked my email client (and all others). I probably check email once a month now to see if my invoice has been accepted, and ignore the hundreds of unread emails.

My work outlook email reads 85k unread messages. Its the issue when you have been in ops related roles for a while in a enterprise. There is so much automated crap that gets sent your way. You can filter etc, but there is always one important thing that arrives from the same email which means i cant just push it to the trash... i mean archive folders. At this point my goal is to at least reach 100k before changing jobs.

Our company had the same shift, but it's not so much forbidden as just unsupported as they disabled simple password auth.

If you waddle through setting up a project on the google developers console, setup your own oauth auth flow, find/scaffold something with mutt oauth script to fetch your mails locally, then you can likely get it to work too... (And then sending mails is another sidequest, and if sending mail breaks for some reason that's one in two odds you don't notice for a couple of days.. but it's fine spending work time on this right?)

How they react after you're done is another problem though... I told the IT lead and his reaction was just a shrug, but some could be more vindictive.

I fear in the age of LLMs this is what the web as a whole will turn into. Largely business related spam and meaningless cruft that we sometimes dig through enough to find gold

I'll never understand all the hate for email. What's so dreadful about it? Email has become my preferred communication medium.

There are many times I want to share longer, personal stories with friends, and sometimes those evolve into philosophical discussions about human nature. Other times it could be travelogues or lengthy discussions about art, e.g. my friends and I might go to museums and share our experiences over email, listing our favorite works and why.

I suppose I’m nostalgic for the epistolary culture of the Victorian era. Long-form emails encourage the kind of reflection people once found in diaries and letters. I’m grateful to have found friends who share an appreciation for that virtue, but I consider that more of a miracle than anything else.

The best thing to come out of the internet!

I had this realization a year or so ago after emailing a professor from a university I'll never go to and a local academic responsible for an interesting piece of software, it's magical

i guess most of people associate emails with work and that's why they might not like it, they feel that it's smth strict. but actually, i agree with author with the point that emailing is such a great thing!

The issue is corporate-managed systems are universally bad (with the endless cycle of something new coming in and being ruined), and so while in theory email can be great, the workflows to make it work inherently conflict with the corporate setup...

Agreed! Email is the Donald Trump of technologies! I've emailed, and gotten answers from, CEOs, investors, celebrities, open source geniuses and all kinds of people who in real life are surrounded by body guards and administrative staff do block contact.

It's amazing how big a reach a well crafted and intelligent email has.

I don't get the Donald Trump analogy

> the Donald Trump of technologies

Outdated, and in need of replacing? Unfit for the position? A poor choice?

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WTF are you trying to say? Are you for or against email? You say it's awful, then say it's amazing, I'm confused.

Obviously, they mean “well crafted and intelligent.” /s

i would argue that they mean "transparent" and "easy to engage with", both of which just seem to be propaganda to my eyes.

I mean perhaps its me being cynical but I read it as meaning the ability for idiots to rub shoulders with giants

i was trying to take their comment in good (relative) faith, but obviously if they're not going to elaborate, anyone is free to draw their own conclusions!

Reading charitably I think he means that it's a shortcut to gaining influence.

In the boomer sense of "go to the store and ask if they need help".

Trump "pushes" his way into things (because he's a disgusting bully), but it largely works.

I think the parent meant it in this way, that email pushes its way into peoples private box, but this is probably same as actually sending a letter to someone.

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