[baddox]

I'm basically the opposite. I cannot stand email for day-to-day work discussion, because there is effectively no way to distinguish messages by priority or time-sensitivity. Email sits in the horrible middle road between synchronous (like a phone call) or asynchronous (like a physical mailed letter). I think email works well (and seems to be designed) for the latter use case, but at work there may be an expectation of prompt responses.

For me, Slack and similar work really well for small companies or teams (20 or less). I haven't experienced work chat in a larger company or team, so I could see it getting messy.

As for people getting mad at you for going offline to buckle down and get work done, that seems like a business culture issue that isn't going to be any better at the same company if they got rid of work chat.

[m_fayer]

Yeah I was another Slack-complainer until I joined an organisation without any sort of business-chat system. That's when my amnesia cleared up and I remembered just what a slog email is without a Slack-like. I remembered that email is used as chat when there's no proper chat system, that it's an unsearchable unstructured endless soup of important stuff, cat videos, unnecessary reply-all mashing, mysterious banishment to the spam folder, and wheat-to-chaff (greetings, unnecessary opening pleasantries, huge sigs) ratios that make enterprise-Java look lean. I'm in a constant state of anxiety over my inbox because I never know if I'm mistakenly ignoring or overlooking something important. In various ways, Slack ameliorated all these things for a downside that is in retrospect completely acceptable.

[ethnic_throw]

Wait you think email is LESS searchable than Slack?

[cortesoft]

Wait, why is email unsearchable?

[Kadin]

Mostly Microsoft Outlook.

(But more seriously, even with a good MUA and either client-side or server-side search, the way mail messages are constructed, with tons of reply quoting, makes searching them a pain.)

In lots of business cultures there's no expectation to search email, because it's so hard to get useful results that way, so if you send it in an email you can expect to have people just ask you to send it again. Even if you can use search, it still sucks.

Slack is not perfect but it's at least designed for search.

[zo1]

MS Outlook's search is pretty damn good, I have no idea what you're talking about. It's not perfect, and definitely not "google"-like in terms of guessing what you're actually trying to look for, but it gets the job done.

[austinjp]

Perhaps I'm just too used to Gmail, but it always seems to take me forever to work out the equivalent of things like "from:me to:susan in:folder has:attachment".

And in outlook's web interface, this all seems to be even worse. Emails somehow just vanish. Not good.

[fstephany]

Search is one of the main reason why I ditched Thunderbird for GMail...

[m_fayer]

I was exaggerating, it's not that it's totally unsearchable, but it just doesn't have enough structure, so sometimes you get lucky, sometimes a search ends up being a 15 minute spelunking expedition.

[andrewfong]

> effectively no way to distinguish messages by priority or time-sensitivity

How do you do that with Slack?

[baddox]

Slack messages that notify you (mentions and DMs) should be for time-sensitive things. Obviously that can still be abused, but I think the social expectations are much clearer than when a team uses email for everything.

[ethnic_throw]

> but I think the social expectations are much clearer than when a team uses email for everything.

In my experience, this is typically the expectation to respond immediately regardless of the query.

Nope.

[__MatrixMan__]

Channel -> [gear icon] -> mute

Alternatively:

Channel -> [gear icon] -> Notification Preferences -> Just mentions