
What Paul Graham got right – and what he missed – about email - fredrivett
https://medium.com/@zoho/what-paul-graham-got-right-and-what-he-missed-about-email-9fb5e37f3957#.yfumhhbas
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Jaruzel
As I was reading this, I'm thinking 'there's no insights in this, it's just a
lot of questions'.

Get to the bottom paragraph, and it's an advert for their product, Zoho
SalesInbox.

I think it's now time that large blog platforms like Medium, clearly mark at
the beginning if a post is promotional fluff or not (Paper press legally have
to do this, so why not Digital?).

Anyway, back to the subject in hand, I think email gets a bad bashing. Yes
it's clearly no longer fit for purpose if your company is a fresh startup with
great ideas, and a breakneck agile ethos, but for us mere mortals who are
basically chained to a corporate desk in a workplace that's been around for
decades with such and ingrained culture that a sandstorm couldn't wipe it,
it's the cornerstone of how we work. Here's why:

1\. Long form requests and file attachments are still commonly sent over email
- it's your copy to do with what you want.

2\. It's easy to sort and search by a defined subject or keyword, and see the
threaded conversation in isolation from everything else.

3\. It's a standard protocol - everything can send an email - this is both a
blessing and curse really.

4\. It's got a chain of custody (of sorts), once it's been read in your inbox,
it's basically immutable - no takey-backseys by deleting that bit of the
conversation in IM or a forum post.

5\. In larger organisations it's quite common for people to write full
documents in the email body, complete with headers and formatting and even
diagrams! Try doing that in Slack :)

However, I'd love to see an overhaul of the system. As someone who recently
left a role that had death-by-email every day I do agree that too many things
are sent over email, and people need to be more judicious with their use of
'reply all' (or even actively trimming/adding people when required). There
also needs to be attempts at presenting emails in a new way - the folder+inbox
paradigm is no longer optimal.

As long as the right tool is used for the right job, I think that IM and Email
and Phone all should happily co-exist...

After all, you can't build a house with just one hammer.

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fredrivett
Email, and making email better, is a topic everyone connected to the internet
should care about. I know I do. I'm especially intrigued by how email can be
tailored to different needs. Whilst I'm not in sales, I can see the value
here. Intrigued to hear others thoughts.

