
The Triumph of Email - ForHackernews
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/what-comes-after-email/422625/?single_page=true
======
vinceguidry
Email works reasonably well for exactly what it should be used for. If you're
having a problem with it, you're either using the wrong collaboration tool or
you're using the tool incorrectly.

Email is still the most lucrative marketing channel you can devise. I've yet
to find a better intra-office communication tool. If I'm having trouble doing
it with email, I immediately switch gears and either get up and go talk to
somebody or to go do some fact-finding.

Email allowed me to maintain long-distance friendships where otherwise we
would have drifted off. Email is easily categorizable and sortable. My
workflow takes close to a minute to clear everything out to where only open
loops are in my inbox.

I look at everyone who wants to replace email with someone else like I would a
25 year old bro who thinks he's going to 'disrupt' something ridiculous like
politics. Harmlessly stupid at best, dangerously power-hungry at worst. Look
somewhere else to build your empire, buffoon.

~~~
u801e
> Email is still the most lucrative marketing channel you can devise. I've yet
> to find a better intra-office communication tool.

I would say that having a private intranet only NNTP server with discussion
groups would be far better than just using email.

For one thing, you already have grouping of general topics on a server level
rather than having to take the time to create rules/filters and IMAP folders
in using the email client. Second, it's much easier to access previous
messages by just subscribing to the group (rather than having someone forward
you an email which you have to read from bottom to top to get a summary of
what was discussed). Lastly, it separates discussions from personal
communication (emails sent directly to you).

~~~
vinceguidry
I'm shuddering at the thought of training our customer service team on using a
news reader. There's more to a good tool than features.

~~~
u801e
Many email clients already support interacting with NNTP servers. IIRC,
Windows (Live) Mail, Outlook Express, and Thunderbird all support reading
email as well as newsgroups.

IME, it's no different than using email other than the fact that you'll have a
Newsgroups field instead of a To field. Composing and replying are pretty much
the same as email. And each subscribed newsgroup could just as well be thought
of as an email folder.

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wespad
I work a cubicle job in the financial services industry, a large back-office
for one of the largest independent broker/dealer networks in the country.
Attending to email is essentially the crux of my job. The entire corporation
is held together by email. My eye is constantly on not just my personal inbox,
but several shared inboxes. A certain type of email hits a certain inbox and
the clock starts ticking, I have a specific time frame in which to process a
series of actions. I am just one cog. Once I'm done with my part, I fire off
an email that hits a number of other shared inboxes and people in other
departments pick up the baton and do their processes. If I fall out of my
prescribed time frame, I become a bottleneck, the issue gets escalated to
higher-ups and it can impact my performance review. If I get too many at once,
I'm S-O-L. And, oh yeah, there are also faxes.

~~~
gglitch
That sounds so much like Gilliam's _Brazil._ Good luck.

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theophrastus
Slightly curious, this exact linked-to article had a different headline less
than a week ago, specifically "What Comes After Email"[1]. Furthermore, there
were a number of minor edits made which removed any of the "Email is dead!"
thesis. So somehow, in that small amount of time, email was resurrected at the
hands of The Atlantic editors.

[1]
[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/what-c...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/what-
comes-after-email/422625/)

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dsparkman
Email's greatest advantage is that it is a distributed system. No silos
involved. If I want to run my own system, I can. The current hipster tech
crowd seems to forget the very definition of the term Internet (network of
networks). As such, the systems designed at its origin were design to work in
a distributed fashion.

Email is not dead. Email is just plumbing. Want a different experience with
it, use better software layered on top.

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scholia
_" White-collar workers check their inboxes an average of 77 times a day,
according to research by Gloria Mark, an informatics professor at the
University of California, Irvine. (If that sounds low to you, she found some
workers check email far more frequently, up to 343 times a day or more.) The
more time people spend focused on email, Mark has found, the less happy and
productive they are."_

This seems odd to me. I check my email half a dozen times a day. Can't see the
point of checking it 10 times an hour....

~~~
chmars
Maybe through notifications … many users probably don't turn the default
notifications off and get distracted all the times. And on OS X at least, it
is tricky (or maybe even impossible) to proactively disable unwanted
notifications for your users.

OK, instant messaging and social media networks are even worse … in the end,
most human beings get easily distracted and it takes some energy to avoid
distractions, especially due to messages and related notifications of all
kind.

~~~
hollerith
I was a little hesitant to write this reply because I might not fully
understand your comment. In particular, I do not understand why you added the
3 words "for your users" to this next sentence:

>And on OS X at least, it is tricky (or maybe even impossible) to proactively
disable unwanted notifications for your users.

It was possible for me to turn off all notifications on OS X. This next
command line got rid of most of them, leaving only the occasional notification
from Firefox and maybe some other app asking for permission to upgrade the
app. Then installing and using Growl from the Mac app store got rid of the
rest.

launchctl unload -w
/System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.notificationcenterui.plist; killall
NotificationCenter

The only disadvantage I am aware of of turning off all notifications in this
way is that when there is a new security update for OS X available, it remains
uninstalled (because I remain unaware of its existence) until I manually open
the app store.

A running app can still get my attention by bouncing its dock tile, but they
do not do that often enough to be bothersome, and in the case of my IM client,
the bouncing is welcome (because it is how I find out someone sent me an IM
and because my IM client can be configured to refrain from bouncing its dock
tile for events other than new IMs).

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ForHackernews
I thought this was an interesting history of email, though the end does read
like a submarine ad[0] for Slack.

[0]
[http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

------
echochar
The article seems to suggest the fact that "email" is so old is significant.
IRC is quite old too. And that's what Slack is, with some enhancements. Email
has also undergone many "enhancements". Yet the article never mentions IRC.
What is old is new again. Keep those articles coming.

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interfixus
Surprised to see this expression popping up yet again, "to check one's email".

We checked our email in the nineties. These days our email checks us. Or am I
the the only one left on a decent IMAP server?

~~~
koralatov
It depends on your use-case. I very deliberately put myself in the position of
checking my email, despite having all of the technical pieces in place to have
email pushed to me.

My work email polls every 30 minutes, with notifications disabled, and I check
it as and when it suits my workflow. My (personal) phone is always in Low
Power mode, so doesn't poll for email unless I open the Mail app; I use
offlineimap in combination with mutt for my home email (the same account which
is on my phone), and it automatically synchronises with the IMAP server every
15 minutes, but again get no notifications and I check it whenever it suits
me.

On top of that, all of my computers and devices are always muted unless I'm
actively doing something that requires sound, like listening to music or
watching a video, so even if there was an errant notification, I certainly
wouldn't hear it. I also don't have my phone set to vibrate.

I didn't deliberately aim to operate in this mode, and gradually ended up here
after a lot of single changes made over a long time, but I find that it's the
best way for me to work.

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chmars
1/2 OT:

This evening, I always get '404 Not Found – nginx/1.8.0' from theatlantic.com
if I use Chrome. Firefox and Safari on the other hand work … Google Cache via
Chrome works too.

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brownbat
If I send an anonymous note from a disposable box, it will probably slam into
a spam filter.

I don't think email is as flat as it used to be. If that's what we will
eulogize about email, then maybe it's already dead.

It was probably too flat back then to be workable, but there were some perks.

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salmonet
I expect that email will phase out slowly in the same way Craigslist is.
Craigslist used to be a place to get tickets to sporting events, find used
stuff you need, find employees, personals etc. But startups have found much
better ways to solve individual niches. I now prefer slack to email for in-
office communication, I prefer live chat to email for customer service,
certain social media marketing replaces some email blasts.

------
smegel
> It was completely ephemeral

Doesn't sound much like email to me.

~~~
mbfg
I see these posts all the time and wonder what i missing. Email works
perfectly well, and fits many of my needs to a high level. I have no issues
with it, and it's not like i don't get much email, given the number of mailing
lists i subscribe to, i probably get significantly more than most 'normal'
people do.

