But emails can be reference documents too! In fact I would argue most work emails that are longer than a few lines are a reference document of some sort.
Then you are better off using some format that can stand alone as a file such as PDF. If it is a reference document that is intended to be edited on an ongoing basis it is better to use something like a wiki. Having to root around in your email to find a reference document is pretty inefficient and annoying.
All of the reasons given against HTML emails hold at least equally well against PDF: it's a vector for phishing and tracking, ripe with client vulnerabilities, less accessible and not displayable on a terminal. For me as a reader having to read both an E-Mail and the attached PDF is also annoying, and many people will simply skip reading the PDF.
why not let people syntax highlight the way they want? some people dislike syntax highlighting, some like high contrast highlighting, some like blue-tinted highlighting, etc. why do you get to decide for everyone what colour strings should be?
send the plaintext code snippet and they'll decide.
For the life of me I can’t remember the syntax for a particular thing I do in the JavaScript console at work. Someone showed me the trick in an email about seven years ago and about once a month I need to do this thing so I search my inbox for the email so I can remember the syntax.
It might be "easier and faster" to send an email than to, for instance, upload to a dedicated snippet manager, but literally everything after than that is slower and more difficult.
Exactly, work mailboxes are a treasure trove of automatically-archived information. I'd argue that these days, emails form more of a "knowledge base" than any other single repository of information for most organisations.
This is very true and yet the search tools supplied with these knowledge bases are terribly inadequate. Is there a better, standalone tool out there for turning email archives, from multiple sources, into a usable database with a powerful query language?
Not sure if that's what you're looking for, but you could use notmuch[0]. Haven't used it a lot, but I think it can import an mbox? Maybe you can merge multiple mboxes together?
I looked into that a few times, just haven't had the patience to get through the setup process. Maybe I'll get it done this time. There goes my afternoon :)
I was keeping an eye on this in the hope that someone had a good answer for it. What features would you consider adequate for this kind of email search? At the moment I just have everything in Thunderbird and it does a passable full-text search on a ~5gb mailbox but I haven't experimented with anything fancier.
email is a terrible place to keep reference documents.
"where's the information on that?" "oh, you should have it in your email somewhere. I think I got one a few months ago about it"
no. just. no. If you care _at all_ about your reference documents you get them out of email ASAP.
And that's ignoring that anyone can delete old emails and thus not have what you considered a reference doc but they just considered old mail. Or that the server could loose your emails and no-one has they synced locally these days.
> email is a terrible place to keep reference documents.
Newsgroups are better in that regard. You can reference the message using the message-id value. A lot of newsgroups would have FAQS posted every 30 days or so. A reference document that's periodically updated could be sent the same way.
