[black3r]

What emails suck at is communication between multiple people in a work setting. That's why Slack, Teams, and others emerged and got popular.

For example:

- When multiple people respond to the same email, the email "thread" branches out into a tree. If the tree branches out multiple times, keeping track of all the replies gets messy.

- While most clients can show you the thread/tree structure of an email chain, it only works if you've been on every email in the chain. If you get CC'd later, you'll just see a single email and navigating that is messy.

- Also if you get CC'd later, you can't access any attachments from the chain.

- You can link to a Slack/Teams conversation and as long as it's in a public channel, anyone with the link can get in on it (for example you have a conversation about a proposed feature which then turns into a task -> you describe the task simply and link "more info in this slack convo"), you can't do that with Emails (well I guess you could export a .eml file, but it has the same issue as getting CC'd later)

- When a thread no longer interests you, you can mute it in Slack/Teams. You can't realistically do that with emails, as most people will just hit "reply all"

- But also sometimes people will hit "reply" instead of "reply all" by a mistake and a message doesn't get delivered to everyone in the thread.

[wisidisi]

I oppose. Mails are superior in announcing to multiple people. If people want to participate they can in many ways. It is well structured, well documented and offers coherent discourse. Slack/Teams are for just-in-time dynamic, collaborative conversation that are quickly fading and missing out on all the strengths mails have in terms of permanence, archival, search and general quality. Something that totally gets lost in instant messaging like Discord, Teams and such where context is basically non-existant and may be gone completely in minutes.

Remember Google+ ? What lasted was Gmail and barebone simple Mail.

[marbletiles]

> Mails are superior in announcing to multiple people

People who are known at time of sending. A slack message can be searched by those joining the team much (much) later, those who move teams, in-house search bots, etc. Mailing lists bridge this gap to some extent, but then you're really not just using email, you're using some kind of external collaboration service. Which undermines the point of "just email".

[cycomanic]

> > Mails are superior in announcing to multiple people > > People who are known at time of sending. A slack message can be searched by those joining the team much (much) later, those who move teams, in-house search bots, etc.

People use slack search successfully? It's search has to be one of the worst search implementations I have come across. Unless you know the exact wording in the slack message, it is almost always easier to scroll back and find the relevant conversation just from memory. And that says something because the slack engineers in their infinite wisdom (incompetence) decided that messages don't get stored on the client, but get reloaded from the server (wt*!!), so scrolling back to a conversation that happened some days ago becomes an excercise of repeated scroll and wait. Slack is good for instant messaging type conversations (and even for those it quickly becomes annoying because their threads are so crappy), not much else. I wish we would use something else.

[theshrike79]

How would you search from mail threads you weren't CC'd on?

[layer8]

MS Exchange had sort-of solved that problem with Public Folders. Basically shared email folders across an organization.

The older solution is NNTP/Usenet. I wish we had a modern system like that.

[throw0101a]

> Mailing lists bridge this gap to some extent, but then you're really not just using email, you're using some kind of external collaboration service. Which undermines the point of "just email".

Mailing lists are just email. They simply add a group archiving system.

[mixcocam]

thats why online private archives like https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/ exist. for a free version, use groups.google.com

[PretzelFisch]

you just use a shared inbox for the team

[NBJack]

This assumes said email is properly filtered and doesn't get lost in a sea of work spam. I also assert email is actually terrible at context; unless that is part of an existing thread, or again your filtering/sorting is great, you will often spend at least a paragraph just establishing context.

> It is well structured, well documented and offers coherent discourse.

You must have great coworkers who know how to communicate. I cannot say the same for everyone at my company. Email at many of the places I've worked can quickly devolve on more than 3-5 replies.

[nkrisc]

Worse than the work email spam at some of my previous jobs was the Slack spam - at least the email spam was work-related. Too many people substitute work for a social life and treat Slack like they’re on a group chat with friends.

[lostlogin]

> Worse than the work email spam at some of my previous jobs was the Slack spam

It’s annoying if not muted and you need to work. Why not do that?

A workplace with no chat and zero talk would be pretty grim.

[theshrike79]

If the company Slack doesn't have a #memes channel, I don't want to work there.

[hnlmorg]

There's nothing wrong with social chat on Slack. It just needs to be either in a thread or, better yet, in a dedicated social channel.

Saying people shouldn't have social chat on Slack is like people shouldn't have social chat in the office kitchen because it's part of the same office complex.

[nkrisc]

And if they did that, I’d have nothing to complain about. That’s never been my experience though with Slack at work.

[hnlmorg]

That’s unfortunate but it’s not a universal trend.

The problem here isn’t Slack, it’s poor Slack etiquette. However you can change etiquette at a company level.

[tayo42]

@here I need an update on a ticket

@here were doing some it maintenance over the weekend in the middle of the night on a system no one uses

[portaouflop]

Google+ dies not because it was a bad product but because google changed strategy and killed it.

Ultimately it’s all subjective - some people prefer email some chat some calls some no comms at all.

If you can communicate well, articulate what you say and want well, and actually read and understand what I write then I will communicate over any medium with you. If not then I’ll have a bad time regardless of medium

[mrweasel]

I do agree that email quickly becomes messy, even with mailing lists. It's really much the same issue Slack has, a lack of training. It's just assumed that people will know how to use both email and Slack, but we don't. For email it's a decade old debate, that rational minds lost as Outlook dictated top-reply, forcing you to read threads backwards and discouraging the recipient from inline replies and cutting out irrelevant parts.

Slack is equally terrible, because the interface and threads is actually hard to navigate and I honestly cannot make search work in a rational manor. The more discusions you have in Slack, the worse it becomes.

[skydhash]

Slack is the equivalent of shouting across the room. I copied anything that seems important to my notes. Any message that’s more than an handful of screen old can be considered lost.

[maccard]

IMO, that's a benefit of slack. At $LAST_JOB, we had a 30 day expiry on data in slack, which everyone was in uproar over initially. But, it forced us to actually put stuff elsewhere.

[rkomorn]

I thought so when I started at a company that had that policy but in the end we still mostly ended up with split-brain issues (eg some information is shared in both places, some in only one, some updates get lost) with the added negative that stuff disappeared from Slack.

It's just a hard problem overall when you have email, chat, wiki, docs, and a ticketing system.

And, unfortunately, all these things exist because not one of them is actually good beyond its scope (if it's even good within its scope to begin with).

[stared]

Sure, emails are not the right tool for multiple people discussing a project, even less - when we want to add new members to a thread, or to leave (by those who were added, but for whom it is not longer relevant).

At the same time, when I was a cofounder & CTO, I used Basecamp, which promoted email-like threads. (There is a chat-like functionality as well, but I made policed to use it only for impromptu things like setting Zoom meetings or so, nor for anything that may be important in the future (brainstorming, ideas, architecture choices, analyzis, etc).

It created a culture of clarity of thoughts I never had before, or after. And yes, they a year later is was easy to search for why we picked this way of optimizing quantum computing in Rust not another (which pros and cons, possible paths not yet explored, etc), go back to unused UI designs, retrieve research for publication, etc.

[sethammons]

Work said "email is not official, use slack." We literally had a meeting where people were complaining about not knowing about recent changes. "We announced it in these 5 channels, we will start announcing it in more."

Like, email works for announcements yo. Naw, let's jeep messaging N other places.

[ctkhn]

Isn't there one company wide channel? With slack or email, you still need to make a list of people who get the announcement. Slack has been a lot better in my experience for joining a team and looking back at the history

[keiferski]

I’ve always thought email needs a new “view mode” that somehow imports the email structure without actually using a separate program like Slack. Something like an expanded workflow view that shows emails as a series of separate nodes flowing in one direction.

The key point being that this is not a separate program, but a different way to view the data already inside emails.

I’m just brainstorming here so apologies if this doesn’t make much sense.

[general1465]

So maybe having some hybrid like Slack/Teams over email? Where UI of such email client is rendering emails as a room/channel and subject is the name of the room (removes RE, FW, ...) and works like room identification?. So you will get IRC like experience. If you will add PGP on top of it, it can be also secure and decentralized.

[AJ007]

Delta Chat certainly could emerge in that direction. https://delta.chat/

[lostlogin]

The ‘reactions to emails’ thing that Outlook does is gross. However I avoid most chat apps and dislike email so I’m probably not a representative user.

[kitd]

I find a structured conversation far easier to work with personally.

You can respond only to the subthread you want to, and not have the single thread become a mess of quoted and irrelevant replies that you have to scroll past to find the answer you want.

Additionally, shared folders fit well within a team environment and works much like usenet for messaging.

[dogleash]

All those problems with email sound like a treat compared to screenshots of chats I'm not in.

[James_K]

The tree format seems an advantage, if anything. It naturally separates discussions into separate threats. Messaging software would dump all these into a single channel so you could have different conversations happening at the same time interspersed.

[mrbadguy]

Agreed, a single thread is painful if it’s actually spawning off multiple sub-topics. I suppose the better answer is to start a separate thread in Slack in that case but it can flow weirdly where the topic originally arises in one place but is continued elsewhere; it relies on someone linking on the original thread to keep context. In a mailing tree, that context is still there.

All of this depends on having a sane email client though, doing it via outlook or gmail is a nightmare and I suspect this is the root of many people’s aversion to email.

[finaard]

The two big problems are shitty mail clients, and people not knowing how to quote (which gets enabled by the shitty mail clients).

If someone gets CC'd later than typically because the discussion got to a point where the input is needed for the current question - and in a mail thread with proper quoting surprisingly often the quoted email is sufficient context for the added guy to jump in.

What makes a big mess out of things is the nested list of fully quoted emails with top answers at the bottom I now have to go through when getting added to figure out what the fuck they want from me.

[tzs]

> When multiple people respond to the same email, the email "thread" branches out into a tree. If the tree branches out multiple times, keeping track of all the replies gets messy

I think this is mostly due to bad UIs in email clients. Usenet had similar, if not more extensive, branching many Usenet clients made this quite manageable. I don't see why similar clients could not be written for email.

[snthpy]

Thank you. This is a very insightful comment that pinpoints something I could never quite put my finger on.

So the issue is that you need a git pull or something like it to prevent branching. Chat etc... achieves this through real-time state management. In an async setting you need something else.

[cwmoore]

Found only “emerge” while searching these comments for the exact term “merge”.

The bifurcations of communications is unmanageable.

Why is my own timeline is still manual, while presumably all the datacenters can combine, search and sort (merge) dated datapoints?

I want a Personal Palantir or something, and no, not vibe coded in a weekend.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

At least at my workplace, chats got popular because it was a way for humans to talk to humans without getting drowned out by dozens of automated messages, irrelevant announcements, and other clutter.

[noosphr]

Mailing lists. They've been around since the 80s. They solve all these problems. They are amazing. Use them.

[portaouflop]

I disagree. I might have been born a generation too late but I think mailing lists are terrible, horrible way to communicate.

My favourite is text forums - I guess shows when I was socialised online

[em-bee]

text forums are just a web interface for mailinglists, or vice versa. google groups and others can (or could) support both, and usenet news too. they are all just messages. the difference is only the tool you use to display them.

[OCTAGRAM]

There was GMANE to convert mailing list into NNTP archive. I was big fan of it. Too bad it's gone

[prokopton]

Hey lets you mute a thread.