What we’ve learned listening to 6,000+ people complaining about email

Their survay conflates "email is broken (email has systemic problems)" with "my email is broken (my email doesn't work)." That's the kind of shitty results you get when you analyze any tweet with the words "email" and "broken" in them.

These reasons have nothing to do with email itself, but just the people that use it. In this order of ideas, we could perfectly say that oral communication is broken, people just don't talk to me enough, or they talk to me all the time! Anyway, I feel like I'm rambling. However, email can be a pain in the buttcrack when it doesn't go down well, which happens strangely often sometimes, so it is kinda broken.

"Email is broken because my startup doesn't own it."

I love email. It works well between people who know how to write email. The main problem is it takes a lot of experience to be good at it. Many people also don't recognize it as something you have to learn.

That being said good filtering, threading, and end-to-end encryption in one reader is still illusive for most of us.

As anyone who's done any level of enterprise support knows is that people hate email, but absolutely freak out when there is the smallest problem with it. For awhile I had my staff attempt to work in a lesson on email during tech orientation for new employees, the problem is that everyone thinks they know how email works, so they'd just tune out. Try explaining the concept that successfully "sending" an email only means that the local server has agreed to accept it, it doesn't mean that the recipient received it and see how far you get. Trying to fix email is a lot more complicated than some fancy pants Framework-Of-The-Moment application purporting to declutter your inbox, it actually is going to involve somehow getting people to understand, at a basic level, how their email gets delivered.

I think the lowest hanging fruit is simply making it easier for the hoi polloi to connect to their accounts easily. NO ONE does a good job with this, not Apple, not Google, not Thunderbird, not Outlook, NO ONE. I've done more freelance work (at absurd rates) simply fixing email client setups than anything else and just making sure that all my client's devices are setup the same. This should be trivial, but it's not.

And don't get me started on all the fantastically crappy email providers out there. I'm looking at you Godaddy, your craptastic email service has wasted more of my time in the past month than I care to think about.

Go Fastmail!

Email's best attribute is that its universal. But that's also a problem: spam, semi-spam, corporate mail to the entire company etc.

I find the existing UIs still manage quoting and threads very poorly. I'd like see improvements in this area. I think a thread markup language might be the answer. Take the exact display of threads away from the client and only mail intent.

Ideally I would only use my email for outbound, and different apps with different purposes for interacting with inbound.

A phone call should go to my email first, then get routed to my current voice app.

A short message should go to my email, then routed to my Viber/SMS/Whatsapp.

An email from my team with an action item, should get routed to my to-do app.

A picture message should get routed to my gallery.

etc...

Clicking on notifications should open the right app, or at least give me options.

The tweet they quote is priceless:

>“Reminder: today is an even-numbered day, so my work email is broken.”

@kevincarey1

Link to the actual tweet: https://twitter.com/kevincarey1/status/520654339703336962

14% complains because they are not receiving enough email ... They probably don't live on the same planet ...