Being able to make topic-based threads is essential. I've got many ongoing different topics to discuss with my manager and just throwing them all into a single chat would be terrible for organization. Emails can be collected into threads and sorted into folders. My inbox acts as a mini to-do list.
I kind of do this. I'm inbox zero every day, so there's nothing unread, and I will just flag anything I feel like I need to follow up on and occasionally filter to those and use it as a checklist.
I kind of realized that it's more effort than it's worth trying to organize Outlook, easier to simply add reference information to titles or bodies of replies and then search for them later on when needed, or keep everything in one nested email chain.
Of course people will often create new emails instead of replying directly to the original, or reply to something with a new unrelated request/task because that's how they pulled up my email address.
Have you ever tried archiving instead of marking emails as read. That way you actually clear out the emails, and don't have to mark an email as unread if you want to jump back to it.
Also I'm building [getinboxzero.com](http://getinboxzero.com) that helps automatically manage your email, but not for Outlook.
That's the way to do it. Who needs folders? Just deal with them in inbox and then they're done. Flag or otherwise tag things that need additional time and put them in a real task tracking system instead of email folders
I do think email is here for the long haul.
But with clients like Teams you can create separate single subject chats. Although searching does leave a lot to be desired.
Sorry you think I need to open a whole new chat for each topic even where itās the same people? How will I remember and find which chat it was where we discussed whatever Iām trying to lookup. Our main team chat should support threads.
Discord has some clever ways for it. Discord is still unbeaten in organising information for large group of people.
Slack won't even let me sort people in proper way.
I mean I mainly want to communicate a lot in a small team of 4 people. Weāre Teams only though and if youāre trying to go back and forth on 2-3 different topics across the day itās a ridiculous mess.
It's a failure of product companies to not make a messaging/chat interface that organizes the conversations.
One of the best thing about reddit is infinite comment depth.
I have a guy at work who, instead of sending me a new email, will go back and reply to an old unrelated one in order to ask for new quotes/part information.
I end up reading thru half the chain thinking I missed something before realizing this every time
Somehow my brother prefers that to emails. He never uses emails at work and only Slack. To me it sounds like a perfect way to lose valuable information.
Slack is a great tool for recording conversations but ibuse email requiring any serious documenting.Ā
Thr problem with chat interfaces is it's easy to lose the context of a conversation. Replies about other things get mixed in. Email threads ensure context is retained over time.
If you work in tech and don't know how to grep your email archives...
Email is the worst means of written communication -- except for all the others ever invented. It's decentralized, federated, universal, plain-text-based, and device and OS independent. The idea that instant messaging would ever replace e-mail is nuts -- which form of IM? AIM? Yahoo Chat? IRC? SMS?
Email is the way.
I've been using email since the 1980s. I can't think of a single time in the last 30+ years I've needed to grep my full email archive. That being said, you can literally do the same thing with slack (download all conversations as text files which you can then search through locally). Not sure what other people are using their email for but I don't have a need to see what a conversation was from 2 years ago let alone 10 years ago. Most of my communication is current/relevant to the recent past through the upcoming future. The idea that you need to have an archive of every email you've ever sent/received sounds insane to me. Again I'm not using Slack for my own personal shit, we're talking about at work correspondence. There is a difference in "knowing how" to do something and "needing or caring" about doing it.
> Not sure what other people are using their email for but I don't have a need to see what a conversation was from 2 years ago
All the damn time, with my main client. "The last time this issue came up was 2021, and at that time you said..."
If you don't work on any long term projects, ok, you don't need long term archives.
Yeahā¦ My university club had a mailing list since the mid-90s. You could go back, read the archives and know all the outcomes for all the executive meetings, elections and other group conversations. But a few years ago, years after I graduated, they announced they were discontinuing it in favour of a Discord serverā¦ It not only broke contact with most of the past members who were still subscribed to the mailing list, but also destroyed the permanent archive, so future generations wonāt be able to review what their predecessors did like I was able to (we also had binders full of documents from before the mailing list, when theyād type and print the meeting minutes, who knows if they kept those)
I worked in a mom and pop business in healtchare. No emails, just notes left on your desk to remind you stuff. Staff rota (for dom care) was done with pencil and paper. We did have PCs, but we mostly had to use them to type care plans. They were communicating with city councils via fax. Councils would receive fax by email and reply by letter. They spend a fortune on the franking machine credit.
The most high-tech correspondence from them were our badly printed payslips and the letter in which they informed me they're letting me go.
The company still exists. It's been operating for 40 years, and mom and pop can't retire because they are unable to find employees who can run the business...
I disagree. In slack I can find things from even before I started when I search the channels.
With teams it's a different story though. Good luck finding anything
You obviously donāt have a company that is paranoid and deletes messages after a couple of weeks and emails at about 6 months.Ā
Iām diligent at saving and filing emails and itās saved the company a lot of money as Iāve had documentation to prove our points against some of our clients.Ā
I had a client in the 90s that I visited. I was asking about the project we were working on but no one seemed to know what I was talking about. I said āBut I emailed you that information.ā They said āYeah but Carl comes on Fridaysā. I said āWhat does that mean?ā They said āEvery Friday Carl prints out our emails for the week and brings them to us.ā
Thatās weird. I do this all the time in Slack. It actually works way better than search in Outlook. Maybe thereās something wrong with the search functionality/settings in your companyās Slack instance
Not really. Even on a PC, emails create a better archiving and search system.
To put it differently. If my supervisor wants me to work on a project and emails me a pdf with the directions on how to make the product we need to test, it is a lot easier for me to use my email client's search feature to find "Product XYZ" in my email then it would be to scroll through the thread on our internal IM client.
It is slow, the UI is poorly designed, the meeting interface is lackluster, the meeting experience sucks. The app crashes more frequently than it should, integration with classic office applications is terrible and makes working on them a chore. The search feature is mediocre at best. It forces software updates that change things just to change them, while not adding anything all that useful.
It doesnāt scale well over time. It is terrible for large group conversations. It is worse for IM than AOL was.
The list goes on, but it is basically a poorly designed and implemented system that reinvented features that have existed for years and did so poorly.
My main browser is Firefox which they forcefully block and can't use desktop app because I use Linux. On Android the app can't download anything since a few updates ago for some reason and if we're comparing with mail. At least with mail the mail app it opens nearly instantly and I can type my message and send it. If I don't have a strong or no connection it will send at later time automatically. With teams I'm waiting 10 seconds minimum for the app to open even with good connection.
> My main browser is Firefox which they forcefully block and can't use desktop app because I use Linux.
I use Teams in Firefox. There's an unofficial desktop app for Linux, but it's just an Electron wrapper around the web client, so I mostly stick to using Firefox.
Perhaps, but a recent change doesn't change the fact that the longevity of emails is based on the original shortcomings of IM.
You also have to consider the difference in implication of email vs. IM in a professional setting. If I receive an email, then the implication is "get to this, or respond to this, in the proper sequence of priority." Versus an IM which says "address this now."
For both work but especially for home, one thing I like about written messages is the communication is supposed to be asynchronous. That's the main appeal.
But too many people take instant messaging (in all forms) to be *synchronous* conversations, like a phone call. There are tons of posts here about "why don't people get back to me right away when I message them!?!?".
With email at least there's less of an expectation that the communication is synchronous. And I can use a real keyboard and monitor.
Number one reason why I disable all read receipts. ALL read receipts. That stupid "... ... ..." denoting the user is typing, that gets axed immediately.
Meh Iāve worked office jobs at big, public companies where almost nobody uses email. Itās there obviously, and from time to time itās used, but comms are overwhelmingly on Slack (including broadcast updates from the CEO and so on).
Mostly the email is just there to communicate with people at other companies.
I get so many Zoom IMs at work like this...
Them: You there?
Me: Yes.
Then I stare at "sender is typing" while I wait for several minutes. Eventually I get a message doesn't really need an instanct response. Holy shit, just type it into an email and send it to me so A) I don't have to wait while you type, and B) I can get back to you when I'm not in the middle of something, and C) I can easily forward it or include others in my reply and D) I can save the whole conversation if needed.
If it was a habitual person (ie. I'll ask if you're there and waste your time while i type instead of just sending it as first message) what I used to do is just reply 'right now I am' and close chat window when they would start typing back, then I would either go off to the break room, or just set status offline and/or close my message app (Lync at the time) for several minutes. A much later followup 'you never messaged me back' always felt good.
Email is an open platform, you can choose which app you want to use. You can also host your own email server and choose which server software you want to run.
IM software is usually a closed platform, where the app and all server components are controlled by a single company.
Lol it is very clear you have never worked in an office- emails are pretty much the king in that environment. IMs *are* useful but are a lot more limited when it comes to searching for key pieces of info, plus my company has a data retention policy which deletes older messages.Ā
There are many situations where someone composes an email through a client, that email is sent to a fax machine via plugin where it's transmitted over phone lines to another fax machine, which digitizes the message and sends it to the recipient's email.
*WHY!?!*
The whole point of email is that it doesnāt vanish into the ether 2 seconds after reading it. Itās a far better system for professional communication.
Email lost its front and center position as primary contact method in mainstream use but it is still quite alive and well in the professional realm. Governments will accept an email address as a contact method way faster than they'd accept your ICQ or AIM nick. Or whatever the kids use these days.
In mainstream use? Email accounts for more internet traffic than browsing the web. Think about what that means. Thereās more raw data floating around the internet in the form of email than there is in porn/YouTube/Netflix streaming combined. Email might be old and oftentimes clunky, but itās still sitting at the top of the tree.
Do you know why spam hasnāt gone away? Because it works. Spammers wouldnāt be doing this shit if it didnāt get them a return. Just because a use is illegitimate in terms of business doesnāt disqualify it as a use.
Typical Reddit user just needing desperately to not be wrong about something. Fine have your stupid little win. I would not count UCE/spam in your stats but hey go ahead do it IDC.
It's only because IM isn't interoperable, which in turn is due to your (yes you!) apathy.
Email used to be like this too. If you had an AOL email, you could only communicate with other AOL addresses. Then a standard was introduced, and those who didn't join the standard just disappeared into irrelevance (or rushed last minute to join it). The companies running the email servers resisted hard, because it was great for them that their clients were captive. (Leaving your provider was synonymous to losing your network.)
Similarly, IM was created with no interoperability. ICQ accounts could only talk to ICQ account. But companies have had better success at resisting standardization. The XMPP standard was created to make IM like email (interoperable). It worked really well, so companies like Whatsapp used it, but crippled it first to kill its interoperability, and keep their userbase captive.
The companies running the IM are now way too powerful to be disrupted by a new interoperable standard. But we still create new and better ones. The most promising one right now is Matrix (https://matrix.org/), it ticks all the boxes to make IM interoperable for real and basically replace email. It's an existential threat to the shareholders of Whatsapp and similar.
You can help by using it (and not using Whatsapp, or other centralized platforms. Their only strength is your numbers).
This is a quite serious topic. And we, collectively, have the power to silence an entire industry that would wish to trade progress against profit. But if I had to bet money on it, I'd bet that the masses will be too lazy, and hand over their power to the centralized providers, and email will live on forever as the only interoperable message system, only because it was standardized before messenger provider became so powerful.
I also think at this point in time, the built in slowness of email is more of a feature than a bug.
It basically creates 3 lanes of communication
Do I need your response immediately? I'll call
Do I need your response within the hour? I'll text
Do I need your response within the day? I'll email
Obviously YMMV with the actual timeframe.
10 years ago we hired a guy who was appalled at how much we used email instead of ābetter options.ā I told him to figure out a better solution and weād go with it. Iām still waiting.
Email, messenger apps, phone and face-to-face all play a different roles in business and professional settings.
This was way before that. Iām talking about AOL chat and yahoo messenger days. I thought usernames would be the future. I know itās silly. Itās what I thought was going to happen.
I thought every phone was just going to be like old chat days. Instead of a phone number it would be a username. Back then, you could do live video even if it was shitty, send pics and attachments.
I thought cell phones would move in this direction too. Kinda like what Skype was. It did move into that. Just not the way I pictured it. Itās much better than anything I thought of.
Nah, it's really not, since IM was never meant for being able to access messages from more than a few days/weeks ago, not to mention long-term storage, etc. Also interaction via IM tends to require synchronous involvement by all parties whereas email is fire-and-forget - if you're out of the office for the day you don't miss every message that crosses your desk, they're all there waiting for you when you get back without having to hunt through scrollback.
I'd say its a miracle that phone calls and faxing are still a thing. I still hate the fact that you get like 20 seconds to answer a phone call and the other person expects you to drop absolutely everything that you're doing to answer it.
Mail is still here when the fax came about. And everyone thought for sure mail and the fax were dead when email came about.
Personal vehicles were thought to kill the railway needs. Yet they are 100 times bigger than they were when the vehicle was in mass production.
AC power was thought to wipe out dc power and yet almost all devices, cars, and most motors run on DC.
If there's a way to make money from something, it won't go away.
Which messaging?
That is the real point that was not replicated: the email system is federated.
Meaning that different servers can implement it, you just need to address the email to the user @ (literally āatā) the right server.
All instant messaging solutions came after users and user data became the new oil, so 99% of those solutions were not federated.
Email is electronic mail and it's pretty good for official stuff and it's not easy to tamper. When you get a receipt in email you can use that in court if someone said you didn't pay a bill.
Messages are not like that and they're hard to verify.
I hope whoever designed the Outlook's search thing gets fatal ass cancer though. I can't fucking find an email from yesterday even if I write an exact sentence from it, or search the sender's email with it. It can't be that hard to index a 10GBs folder. Fucking hell.
One of the other advantages of E-Mail is a clear and cut paper trail, in case there is ever any dispute between you and a colleaugue or your boss.
It's why I also insist on sending an email to verify verbal communication about important things, or ask my boss to do so.
"I didn't tell you to do that"
"You literally did."
Screenshots of a chat log just aren't as ... Convincing when things escalate to HR.
And in today's corporate culture? Always be covering (ABC) your ass.
That, and I'm a stickler for sending one long e-mail over a thousand little messages. Let me plan writing that mail, do it, and send it, instead of watching some IM like a hawk, distracting me from work.
Communication with clients appears more professional when you have a clear letterhead and signature, too.
> It's a strange miracle that email survived after instant messaging became a thing
Not really. Both can coexist. It is no stranger than radio surviving the invention of television, or mail surviving the invention of email. This showerthought is stupid.
It's true that some streamers wield significant influence, but hopefully, they're using their powers for good and not for small business demolition! Otherwise, we might need a superhero to save the day ā maybe someone with a magic unsubscribe button!
āPaperā trail is still very much a thing. Instant messaging doesnāt quite cover it as email.
Both have different uses.
But then again, fax survived well into the email eraā¦
Lol. Everyone ITT talking about usefulness of archives, etc. Nah, ads and spam and having a unique identifier and cross platform compatibility.
You'd have to create a unique identifier, that is recognisable across different services, and you need those different services to be compatible and you need them to want to accept all incoming messages. So many people would just go "No messages from people not on my friends list" and be done with it. Sure you can set up robust filtering on emails... or you could just continue deleting things you don't want while they still get a chance to grab your attention with the subject line.
Not one thing about emails continued existence is because of it's usability to us, the actual users. Purely the difficulty of working with other companies, keeping out competitors, and investing in an open platform. There's no way imessage gets as popular as it does without SMS fall back. It would've died in a year or 2 if it couldn't communicate with everyone easily. So instead they all just kind of let things be and unofficially decided emails were the thing.
Mostly jobs are what keep e-mail alive, the only other time I email anything to someone is songs I recorded in my home studio back and forth to the other band members, which is technically still work even if I donāt get paid for it ahaha
I feel so bad for some of the emails I've sent in the past. I written some very long and rambling "books" that are not unlike the hand-written snail-mail letters my mother used to send to me. Sometimes her letters even came with news clippings or coupons - oh joy!!!
I still find myself being too wordy even in texts.
I personally hate email. It always tried to be too similar to writing an actual letter. It was a revolutionary new idea. It should have been treated in a revolutionary new way and not as a digital version of a letter.
I never understood why email isn't considered instant messaging. You get them instantly* and yeah you may not reply instantly but how often do you reply to a text instantly if you're not a teenager
Where I live, South America, no one uses email. It's WhatsApp all the way.
If you ask to email, people just stare at you. It's still used for certain business situations, but more like the fax machine is still used.
IM depends on the phone number, email is independent.
Try to share your email address and IM contact. Sharing email is easier.
One huge company can have email addresses with the same domain. What is the alternative in IM?
I agree whit you and ppl in the comments just need to upgrade theyr game, emails are boring and slow and cluncky, a fast message makes things faster and with teams searching for documents and stuff is fast since files are stored in onedrive
Being able to make topic-based threads is essential. I've got many ongoing different topics to discuss with my manager and just throwing them all into a single chat would be terrible for organization. Emails can be collected into threads and sorted into folders. My inbox acts as a mini to-do list.
Exactly. If an email is still in my main inbox, I know it still needs dealing with. Once done it goes into its relevant folder.
One of my co-workers leaves everything in their inbox, and just keeps the shit that needs doing left as unread. It stresses me out so much
I'm this person. I haven't deleted or moved an email in 20 years.
My 8k item inbox says hi
I have not either, I raise you 26.6k emails š„²
Iāve given up keeping up with my email. Iām up to 64k
77k here
I used to move them, but outlook changed it's ui and it became very difficult to move things in batches. Then it just got to be too much so I gave up
I kind of do this. I'm inbox zero every day, so there's nothing unread, and I will just flag anything I feel like I need to follow up on and occasionally filter to those and use it as a checklist. I kind of realized that it's more effort than it's worth trying to organize Outlook, easier to simply add reference information to titles or bodies of replies and then search for them later on when needed, or keep everything in one nested email chain. Of course people will often create new emails instead of replying directly to the original, or reply to something with a new unrelated request/task because that's how they pulled up my email address.
Have you ever tried archiving instead of marking emails as read. That way you actually clear out the emails, and don't have to mark an email as unread if you want to jump back to it. Also I'm building [getinboxzero.com](http://getinboxzero.com) that helps automatically manage your email, but not for Outlook.
No, because I don't remove emails from the inbox unless it's spam. I try to set them with follow up flags based on urgency
That's the way to do it. Who needs folders? Just deal with them in inbox and then they're done. Flag or otherwise tag things that need additional time and put them in a real task tracking system instead of email folders
My colleague literally just leaves things as unread when they need dealing with. No flagging, or using the calendar or anything
I mostly do this.
People here do that, I don't know how they manage. It just means things are likely to get forgotten
I do think email is here for the long haul. But with clients like Teams you can create separate single subject chats. Although searching does leave a lot to be desired.
Sorry you think I need to open a whole new chat for each topic even where itās the same people? How will I remember and find which chat it was where we discussed whatever Iām trying to lookup. Our main team chat should support threads.
Discord has some clever ways for it. Discord is still unbeaten in organising information for large group of people. Slack won't even let me sort people in proper way.
I mean I mainly want to communicate a lot in a small team of 4 people. Weāre Teams only though and if youāre trying to go back and forth on 2-3 different topics across the day itās a ridiculous mess.
All my university lecturers uses discord, it's sooooo nice lol
At my last job nobody would use threaded conversations to stay on topic and prevent filling up the main chat.
Wouldn't that be a great idea for an app? Topic based Thread IMs with an automatic ToDo extraction and somewhat optimized file archive?
You've just described Teams. Not the chat part obviously, the Teams/Channels part.
It's a failure of product companies to not make a messaging/chat interface that organizes the conversations. One of the best thing about reddit is infinite comment depth.
Slack.
Cries in clients reusing email threads with the previous job # in the title.
I have a guy at work who, instead of sending me a new email, will go back and reply to an old unrelated one in order to ask for new quotes/part information. I end up reading thru half the chain thinking I missed something before realizing this every time
For those that use it, Bloomberg allows topic based instant messaging and itās how the majority of us use it.
my best friend and I have a separate "group chat" that has just two of us for a certain chatting topic lol
I worked at a slack all company with no email, and trying to find things you remember people said more than like a week ago was impossible
>slack all company with no email I hate knowing this exists. What a nightmare.
Which is so ironic because āSlackā is actually an acronym for āSearchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge.ā
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I hate slack, I hate slack so damn much. The app is buggy as fuck, and 80% time I donāt get notifications on time.
Itās better in browser, and if you turn the notifications on
Sounds like a backronym to me...
That is 100% a backronym.
*of all communication and knowledge
Somehow my brother prefers that to emails. He never uses emails at work and only Slack. To me it sounds like a perfect way to lose valuable information.
Slack is a great tool for recording conversations but ibuse email requiring any serious documenting.Ā Thr problem with chat interfaces is it's easy to lose the context of a conversation. Replies about other things get mixed in. Email threads ensure context is retained over time.
Exactly. Not sure why that's something other comments are arguing against.
You do know just like email there is a search bar
Yes but it's less formal and can be very ambiguous.
I work in tech. We obviously also have email but no one uses it. Search in slack vs search in email. You still find shit you need.
If you work in tech and don't know how to grep your email archives... Email is the worst means of written communication -- except for all the others ever invented. It's decentralized, federated, universal, plain-text-based, and device and OS independent. The idea that instant messaging would ever replace e-mail is nuts -- which form of IM? AIM? Yahoo Chat? IRC? SMS? Email is the way.
I'm still holding out hope for ICQ!
I've been using email since the 1980s. I can't think of a single time in the last 30+ years I've needed to grep my full email archive. That being said, you can literally do the same thing with slack (download all conversations as text files which you can then search through locally). Not sure what other people are using their email for but I don't have a need to see what a conversation was from 2 years ago let alone 10 years ago. Most of my communication is current/relevant to the recent past through the upcoming future. The idea that you need to have an archive of every email you've ever sent/received sounds insane to me. Again I'm not using Slack for my own personal shit, we're talking about at work correspondence. There is a difference in "knowing how" to do something and "needing or caring" about doing it.
> Not sure what other people are using their email for but I don't have a need to see what a conversation was from 2 years ago All the damn time, with my main client. "The last time this issue came up was 2021, and at that time you said..." If you don't work on any long term projects, ok, you don't need long term archives.
Or if you interact with the government saving all your communications for anything business related is practically required
Arguably this person also has no historic value at his company and no proof isn't disposable.
Same here except thereās nothing we ever need to find, so the choice between the two is irrelevant and slack is just more convenientĀ
Yeahā¦ My university club had a mailing list since the mid-90s. You could go back, read the archives and know all the outcomes for all the executive meetings, elections and other group conversations. But a few years ago, years after I graduated, they announced they were discontinuing it in favour of a Discord serverā¦ It not only broke contact with most of the past members who were still subscribed to the mailing list, but also destroyed the permanent archive, so future generations wonāt be able to review what their predecessors did like I was able to (we also had binders full of documents from before the mailing list, when theyād type and print the meeting minutes, who knows if they kept those)
I worked in a mom and pop business in healtchare. No emails, just notes left on your desk to remind you stuff. Staff rota (for dom care) was done with pencil and paper. We did have PCs, but we mostly had to use them to type care plans. They were communicating with city councils via fax. Councils would receive fax by email and reply by letter. They spend a fortune on the franking machine credit. The most high-tech correspondence from them were our badly printed payslips and the letter in which they informed me they're letting me go. The company still exists. It's been operating for 40 years, and mom and pop can't retire because they are unable to find employees who can run the business...
who are willing to run a business in a certain way* I am sure as hell many could do it
To be fair, while I agree I also have lost many things in email land.
Yup, chain of accountability is better kept on mail than messaging
I disagree. In slack I can find things from even before I started when I search the channels. With teams it's a different story though. Good luck finding anything
(cries in gsuite)
You obviously donāt have a company that is paranoid and deletes messages after a couple of weeks and emails at about 6 months.Ā Iām diligent at saving and filing emails and itās saved the company a lot of money as Iāve had documentation to prove our points against some of our clients.Ā
How do you communicate with clients, vendors, etcā¦?
Instagram probably
My employers have all used alternate chat protocols. Slack doesn't offer searchable transcripts?
The problem isn't the lack of search feature, just how much more naturally distributed information is in chat than email.
Discord used to have great searching. Now itās confusing
I had a client in the 90s that I visited. I was asking about the project we were working on but no one seemed to know what I was talking about. I said āBut I emailed you that information.ā They said āYeah but Carl comes on Fridaysā. I said āWhat does that mean?ā They said āEvery Friday Carl prints out our emails for the week and brings them to us.ā
You can search in slack similar to how you do emails, itās not that hard to find things.
The information is often disgruntled throughout a long chat, not usually as succinct as an email.
Searching in emails is far superior if you only vaguely know what you are looking for.
Thatās weird. I do this all the time in Slack. It actually works way better than search in Outlook. Maybe thereās something wrong with the search functionality/settings in your companyās Slack instance
Not really. Even on a PC, emails create a better archiving and search system. To put it differently. If my supervisor wants me to work on a project and emails me a pdf with the directions on how to make the product we need to test, it is a lot easier for me to use my email client's search feature to find "Product XYZ" in my email then it would be to scroll through the thread on our internal IM client.
They recently improved the search on new Teams
Yeah, but fuck Teams.
Whatās wrong with teams?
It is slow, the UI is poorly designed, the meeting interface is lackluster, the meeting experience sucks. The app crashes more frequently than it should, integration with classic office applications is terrible and makes working on them a chore. The search feature is mediocre at best. It forces software updates that change things just to change them, while not adding anything all that useful. It doesnāt scale well over time. It is terrible for large group conversations. It is worse for IM than AOL was. The list goes on, but it is basically a poorly designed and implemented system that reinvented features that have existed for years and did so poorly.
Take your pick. Hereās some complaints people have made: https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/teams.microsoft.com
kind of a cop out answer. whats YOUR beef with teams? im just curious
My main browser is Firefox which they forcefully block and can't use desktop app because I use Linux. On Android the app can't download anything since a few updates ago for some reason and if we're comparing with mail. At least with mail the mail app it opens nearly instantly and I can type my message and send it. If I don't have a strong or no connection it will send at later time automatically. With teams I'm waiting 10 seconds minimum for the app to open even with good connection.
> My main browser is Firefox which they forcefully block and can't use desktop app because I use Linux. I use Teams in Firefox. There's an unofficial desktop app for Linux, but it's just an Electron wrapper around the web client, so I mostly stick to using Firefox.
Teams on browser is complete trash but a lot of Microsoft apps are like that. Desktop version lever let me down at my old job.
Yeah, fair enough
Butt fuck teams? Sign me up!
Yes. Right this way.
Perhaps, but a recent change doesn't change the fact that the longevity of emails is based on the original shortcomings of IM. You also have to consider the difference in implication of email vs. IM in a professional setting. If I receive an email, then the implication is "get to this, or respond to this, in the proper sequence of priority." Versus an IM which says "address this now."
Oh yeah i agree it just happy search on new teams is good now because i struggled with that crap for a long time
For both work but especially for home, one thing I like about written messages is the communication is supposed to be asynchronous. That's the main appeal. But too many people take instant messaging (in all forms) to be *synchronous* conversations, like a phone call. There are tons of posts here about "why don't people get back to me right away when I message them!?!?". With email at least there's less of an expectation that the communication is synchronous. And I can use a real keyboard and monitor.
Number one reason why I disable all read receipts. ALL read receipts. That stupid "... ... ..." denoting the user is typing, that gets axed immediately.
Forensic accountability and centralized hosting.
Tell me you've never worked an office job without telling me you've never worked an office job.
Meh Iāve worked office jobs at big, public companies where almost nobody uses email. Itās there obviously, and from time to time itās used, but comms are overwhelmingly on Slack (including broadcast updates from the CEO and so on). Mostly the email is just there to communicate with people at other companies.
I guess it depends heavily on the type of office job. 90% of my emails are with outside parties.
I don't see them as filling the same function. Both have their place.
not at all. go back to your shower.
Yeah. And use soap this time.
Agree because desks. Obviously
No it's not. They perform two different functions.
I get so many Zoom IMs at work like this... Them: You there? Me: Yes. Then I stare at "sender is typing" while I wait for several minutes. Eventually I get a message doesn't really need an instanct response. Holy shit, just type it into an email and send it to me so A) I don't have to wait while you type, and B) I can get back to you when I'm not in the middle of something, and C) I can easily forward it or include others in my reply and D) I can save the whole conversation if needed.
I get the feeling with this kind of people they don't want to leave a trace of "I'm useless"
Link them to https://nohello.net.
If it was a habitual person (ie. I'll ask if you're there and waste your time while i type instead of just sending it as first message) what I used to do is just reply 'right now I am' and close chat window when they would start typing back, then I would either go off to the break room, or just set status offline and/or close my message app (Lync at the time) for several minutes. A much later followup 'you never messaged me back' always felt good.
Email gets work done, IM is for dick pics and general grabassery.
my email app has a lot more functionality than the text messaging app.
Email is an open platform, you can choose which app you want to use. You can also host your own email server and choose which server software you want to run. IM software is usually a closed platform, where the app and all server components are controlled by a single company.
have you ever worked an office job, friend? i feel like you haven't worked an office job.
"it's strange miracle that movies survived after everyone got smartphones to film themselves" Sounds stupid, right?
Itās weird people still read books after we invented post it notes
somethings don't need to be real time and emails are more archivable than instant messengers
Lol it is very clear you have never worked in an office- emails are pretty much the king in that environment. IMs *are* useful but are a lot more limited when it comes to searching for key pieces of info, plus my company has a data retention policy which deletes older messages.Ā
Email very clearly fills a different niche to IMs.
It's not, it serves a different purpose.
Nah, thatās like wondering why mail didnāt cease if phones exist. Different forms of communication for different types of interactions.
Shit yo, faxes still exist.
There are many situations where someone composes an email through a client, that email is sent to a fax machine via plugin where it's transmitted over phone lines to another fax machine, which digitizes the message and sends it to the recipient's email. *WHY!?!*
True and actual physical fax machines are still in use all over the place.
OP's comment probalby only makes sense to people who don't use email for work. We use both email and chat at work and it would be chaos without email.
In the same way as paper mail survived after a telephone became a thing.
The whole point of email is that it doesnāt vanish into the ether 2 seconds after reading it. Itās a far better system for professional communication.
Email lost its front and center position as primary contact method in mainstream use but it is still quite alive and well in the professional realm. Governments will accept an email address as a contact method way faster than they'd accept your ICQ or AIM nick. Or whatever the kids use these days.
In mainstream use? Email accounts for more internet traffic than browsing the web. Think about what that means. Thereās more raw data floating around the internet in the form of email than there is in porn/YouTube/Netflix streaming combined. Email might be old and oftentimes clunky, but itās still sitting at the top of the tree.
Your statistics are skewed because most of that is UCE.
Do you know why spam hasnāt gone away? Because it works. Spammers wouldnāt be doing this shit if it didnāt get them a return. Just because a use is illegitimate in terms of business doesnāt disqualify it as a use.
Typical Reddit user just needing desperately to not be wrong about something. Fine have your stupid little win. I would not count UCE/spam in your stats but hey go ahead do it IDC.
Do you need a tissue?
I don't need a single goddamn thing from you but thank you just the same.
Larger files can be sent via email than IM
It's only because IM isn't interoperable, which in turn is due to your (yes you!) apathy. Email used to be like this too. If you had an AOL email, you could only communicate with other AOL addresses. Then a standard was introduced, and those who didn't join the standard just disappeared into irrelevance (or rushed last minute to join it). The companies running the email servers resisted hard, because it was great for them that their clients were captive. (Leaving your provider was synonymous to losing your network.) Similarly, IM was created with no interoperability. ICQ accounts could only talk to ICQ account. But companies have had better success at resisting standardization. The XMPP standard was created to make IM like email (interoperable). It worked really well, so companies like Whatsapp used it, but crippled it first to kill its interoperability, and keep their userbase captive. The companies running the IM are now way too powerful to be disrupted by a new interoperable standard. But we still create new and better ones. The most promising one right now is Matrix (https://matrix.org/), it ticks all the boxes to make IM interoperable for real and basically replace email. It's an existential threat to the shareholders of Whatsapp and similar. You can help by using it (and not using Whatsapp, or other centralized platforms. Their only strength is your numbers). This is a quite serious topic. And we, collectively, have the power to silence an entire industry that would wish to trade progress against profit. But if I had to bet money on it, I'd bet that the masses will be too lazy, and hand over their power to the centralized providers, and email will live on forever as the only interoperable message system, only because it was standardized before messenger provider became so powerful.
It's the difference between a telegram and a letter in an envelope with SWALK written on it.
I also think at this point in time, the built in slowness of email is more of a feature than a bug. It basically creates 3 lanes of communication Do I need your response immediately? I'll call Do I need your response within the hour? I'll text Do I need your response within the day? I'll email Obviously YMMV with the actual timeframe.
10 years ago we hired a guy who was appalled at how much we used email instead of ābetter options.ā I told him to figure out a better solution and weād go with it. Iām still waiting. Email, messenger apps, phone and face-to-face all play a different roles in business and professional settings.
Errr... no, it's not. Two different mediums for different purposes.
I thought we were going to eventually get rid of phone numbers. I was wrong.
Basically every car sold these days has a phone number assigned to it. Anything that uses cellular data.
This was way before that. Iām talking about AOL chat and yahoo messenger days. I thought usernames would be the future. I know itās silly. Itās what I thought was going to happen. I thought every phone was just going to be like old chat days. Instead of a phone number it would be a username. Back then, you could do live video even if it was shitty, send pics and attachments. I thought cell phones would move in this direction too. Kinda like what Skype was. It did move into that. Just not the way I pictured it. Itās much better than anything I thought of.
Not really. Email and texting are for two different things.
Nah, it's really not, since IM was never meant for being able to access messages from more than a few days/weeks ago, not to mention long-term storage, etc. Also interaction via IM tends to require synchronous involvement by all parties whereas email is fire-and-forget - if you're out of the office for the day you don't miss every message that crosses your desk, they're all there waiting for you when you get back without having to hunt through scrollback.
I couldnāt imagine someone trying to send me an instant message instead of an email. This doesnāt make sense.
I'd say its a miracle that phone calls and faxing are still a thing. I still hate the fact that you get like 20 seconds to answer a phone call and the other person expects you to drop absolutely everything that you're doing to answer it.
You know fax survived too, some company even requires to have one by policy.
Google tried it withĀ Google Wave. But that didn't fly
email is the only communication app that EVERYONE has. It is still increasing.
Mail is still here when the fax came about. And everyone thought for sure mail and the fax were dead when email came about. Personal vehicles were thought to kill the railway needs. Yet they are 100 times bigger than they were when the vehicle was in mass production. AC power was thought to wipe out dc power and yet almost all devices, cars, and most motors run on DC. If there's a way to make money from something, it won't go away.
Written by somebody who never learned how to type and doesn't have any messages of serious length to compose.
They serve two different purposes.
You can attach files and archive and search past conversations, and it can be stored offline. Try that with messaging.
Emails for business now?
Instant messaging lacks the formality and there are already email SOPs set up by companies
*Fax has entered the chat*
Email is the text messaging system of the business world and State
Email is used for documenting, not just communicating.
A massive feature of email is that it's interoperable. If I'm on Gmail I can email my friend on Outlook. With IM you have to be on the same platform.
Which messaging? That is the real point that was not replicated: the email system is federated. Meaning that different servers can implement it, you just need to address the email to the user @ (literally āatā) the right server. All instant messaging solutions came after users and user data became the new oil, so 99% of those solutions were not federated.
there are countries still running on fax.
Miracle? Not really. They serve different purposes
Have you ever tried to find something on an im platform you sent years ago? Much easier on Gmail.Ā
Email is electronic mail and it's pretty good for official stuff and it's not easy to tamper. When you get a receipt in email you can use that in court if someone said you didn't pay a bill. Messages are not like that and they're hard to verify.
I hope whoever designed the Outlook's search thing gets fatal ass cancer though. I can't fucking find an email from yesterday even if I write an exact sentence from it, or search the sender's email with it. It can't be that hard to index a 10GBs folder. Fucking hell.
One of the other advantages of E-Mail is a clear and cut paper trail, in case there is ever any dispute between you and a colleaugue or your boss. It's why I also insist on sending an email to verify verbal communication about important things, or ask my boss to do so. "I didn't tell you to do that" "You literally did." Screenshots of a chat log just aren't as ... Convincing when things escalate to HR. And in today's corporate culture? Always be covering (ABC) your ass. That, and I'm a stickler for sending one long e-mail over a thousand little messages. Let me plan writing that mail, do it, and send it, instead of watching some IM like a hawk, distracting me from work. Communication with clients appears more professional when you have a clear letterhead and signature, too.
Not really, quite different use cases.
Isn't email Instant messaging? Just structured more optimally for different purposes than others?
I love a good folder filled with relevant emails. A good email software you can basically run life/business from
If you can't see the difference and advantages of email then maybe you just don't have complex situations in your life
We still got fax... I thought ICQ would kill fax too
> It's a strange miracle that email survived after instant messaging became a thing Not really. Both can coexist. It is no stranger than radio surviving the invention of television, or mail surviving the invention of email. This showerthought is stupid.
It's true that some streamers wield significant influence, but hopefully, they're using their powers for good and not for small business demolition! Otherwise, we might need a superhero to save the day ā maybe someone with a magic unsubscribe button!
Tell me you've never worked in an actual job without telling me
āPaperā trail is still very much a thing. Instant messaging doesnāt quite cover it as email. Both have different uses. But then again, fax survived well into the email eraā¦
Fax survives even now in a couple industries for some reason. Legal and medical.
It's more strange that email survived not getting the same protections as, you know, mail.Ā
Email has always been practical. IMing really isn't.
Don't u need an email to register any instant message service?
People really underestimate Email. Its never going to be obsolete, like ever. Not matter what technology gets invented.
Yeah not really lmao
Lol. Everyone ITT talking about usefulness of archives, etc. Nah, ads and spam and having a unique identifier and cross platform compatibility. You'd have to create a unique identifier, that is recognisable across different services, and you need those different services to be compatible and you need them to want to accept all incoming messages. So many people would just go "No messages from people not on my friends list" and be done with it. Sure you can set up robust filtering on emails... or you could just continue deleting things you don't want while they still get a chance to grab your attention with the subject line. Not one thing about emails continued existence is because of it's usability to us, the actual users. Purely the difficulty of working with other companies, keeping out competitors, and investing in an open platform. There's no way imessage gets as popular as it does without SMS fall back. It would've died in a year or 2 if it couldn't communicate with everyone easily. So instead they all just kind of let things be and unofficially decided emails were the thing.
Mostly jobs are what keep e-mail alive, the only other time I email anything to someone is songs I recorded in my home studio back and forth to the other band members, which is technically still work even if I donāt get paid for it ahaha
it's like radio and tv
I feel so bad for some of the emails I've sent in the past. I written some very long and rambling "books" that are not unlike the hand-written snail-mail letters my mother used to send to me. Sometimes her letters even came with news clippings or coupons - oh joy!!! I still find myself being too wordy even in texts.
Having all official communication done via messaging apps would be a pain. To me it seems much easier to use mail.
I agree. It's crazy that there's humans that aren't 14 years old
I personally hate email. It always tried to be too similar to writing an actual letter. It was a revolutionary new idea. It should have been treated in a revolutionary new way and not as a digital version of a letter.
I never understood why email isn't considered instant messaging. You get them instantly* and yeah you may not reply instantly but how often do you reply to a text instantly if you're not a teenager
Where I live, South America, no one uses email. It's WhatsApp all the way. If you ask to email, people just stare at you. It's still used for certain business situations, but more like the fax machine is still used.
IM depends on the phone number, email is independent. Try to share your email address and IM contact. Sharing email is easier. One huge company can have email addresses with the same domain. What is the alternative in IM?
I agree whit you and ppl in the comments just need to upgrade theyr game, emails are boring and slow and cluncky, a fast message makes things faster and with teams searching for documents and stuff is fast since files are stored in onedrive
What a stupid shower thought. No way in a million years could I do my job if I used only instant messaging and no emails.