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Comment by 1659447091 | Hacker News Reader

Why not group emails?

There's a guy that runs multiple sports teams at a local recreation center, in multiple adult divisions (wide age/culture rage), and he has been using email to great effect for over a decade that I have known him. I get 2-3 weekly emails about teams that need a sub for a game and those spots continue to fill up quickly. He probably has the majority of regulars (in the hundreds) at that sports center on his various email list. It just works. They tried chat groups once and that was a disaster.

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I've never seen "group emails" working, even when amongst technical people.

Part of it is just how emails work, part of it is how each clients work, part of it is people not knowing/caring.

  You'll have:

  - the guy that don't use the group email address as recipient, but personal email address 
  - the guy that change the subject which starts a new thread/discussion
  - the guy that include all previous emails in their answer
  - the guy with a signature that takes two screens to scroll
  - the guy with an awful text font/color
  - the guy that CC their whole address book, including the group email address, for personal stuff
  - ...

I can go on. I went through this mess many times during the years, in various contexts; always the same result.

Subject lines shouldn't be relied on to identify emails. In-Reply-To / References exists in most clients if the mailing list specifies a Message-ID...

Subject lines have always been the best way and most emails could be nothing but subject line if blank bodies were allowed.

But because subject lines are more work and people who love sending email tend to love it because it is very low effort, the venn of email senders and those who write subject lines is small.

Here’s how you do it: <https://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html>

That site seems to serve offensive images¹.

(¹yes, it seems like you can work around it by going to the URL de novo, … but IDK, doesn't seem worth it.)

Lol jwz still has the HN referrer image set.

What did HN ever do to him anyways?

It seems he just doesn't like that ycombinator is in the domain name.

Threading does not change the ways email sucks.

even in the best scenarios, a well organized group of people is not using all the features of email "properly" to say nothing of groups that are supposed to have the general public.

I have.

For hackerspaces, tech meetups, book clubs, cycling clubs, city cleanup volunteer groups…

It works fine.

Don’t let your bad experience ruin it for everyone. Especially with an administrative backend, email-based distribution and comms works great for smaller groups!

I move into a neighbourhood of new houses in 2007. One of the guys there worked IT at a university and set up a mailing list of the neighbourhood. It was used successfully for all sorts of coordination, neighbourhood watch, internal news, etc.

There's always someone mis-using it, and the same applies to every other platform. There's always someone hijacking forum threads, or asking questions in comments instead of starting a new topic. None of this is exclusive to email.

Hijacking threads was a problem on our neighborhood mailing list (the most egregious example being hijacking a welcome thread to complain about trash pickup). The solution was pretty easy: auto-lock threads after a week of inactivity. We found that on-topic discussion settled after about that long. People are then forced to start new threads. If there is something new on an old thread, it can be administratively resurrected.

How do you do that with email?

Your replies are to the mailing list address (we use groups.io). The server gets to decide whether or not to forward your reply to the rest of the mailing list based on the age of the topic.

> Why not group emails?

Yes, email is the absolute best for opimal reach. All the proprietary platforms are inherently fragmented and gatekeeped by their corporations. Trying to find a common denominator is hard. Email is standard, not owned by anyone and thus universal.

Why not group emails?

Email is a push technology. And the receiver has to manage their inbox for the sender’s enthusiasm.

2-3 weekly emails

A web page could update in real time. It would be more work for the sender. And less work for everyone else.

That doesn't track. As a recipient, checking one location for updates (my inbox) is easier than polling N websites for updates. If I had to recall all the various websites for everything I need updates for, I'd quickly miss updates.

discourse combines web forum and email, people can use either one as they see fit.

https://github.com/discourse/discourse

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