6 ms·

Email is just fine. It lets you address things as you like, puts no time pressure on you, and gives you a written record of your discussions. It's also low-over

by pstack 13y ago

Email is just fine. It lets you address things as you like, puts no time pressure on you, and gives you a written record of your discussions. It's also low-overhead and universal. Don't blame email, if you can't create a few simple inbox filters to manage the cruft for you. It has been many years since people actually suffered from the weight of zillions of spam messages in their inbox. We've largely addressed the spam thing. The non-spam stuff is going to be dumped on you, whether it's in email or phone calls or text messages or instant messages or facebook messages or instagram messages or whatever the fuck it is teenagers are doing these days that makes email "irrelevant".

pixl97 13y ago
>It has been many years since people actually suffered from the weight of zillions of spam messages in their inbox. And this is part of what makes email close to useless these days. Outside of your own organization you have no idea if your mail was delivered or black holed at a server somewhere never to be heard from again. Too many servers still do the wrong thing, accept and delete, rather than reject at HELO. You wouldn't care much if the post office dropped all the ads for $5.99 pizza before they got to your post box, but if your bills got lost regularly you would be unhappy, and that's the problem with email.
- benihana 13y ago
  >And this is part of what makes email close to useless these days. Outside of your own organization you have no idea if your mail was delivered or black holed at a server somewhere never to be heard from again. I work in the domain of email and I'm not really sure how you came to this conclusion. I work on an internal team at a fairly well known e-commerce site and because of a few simple metrics, we have very high confidence in our mail being delivered. Not only marketing newsletters but also transactional emails like receipts and shipping notifications.
  - greenyoda 13y ago
    I'll second that. I've been using e-mail since the 1980s and have never had a problem with receiving a legitimate e-mail. Banks and other businesses always tell you to add their notification addresses to your contact list to avoid their messages being marked as spam, but I've never found this to be necessary.
  - wl 13y ago
    Speaking for myself, you've got reliable delivery for the kinds of emails that matter least to users. I really don't care to receive most "transactional" emails and I definitely don't care about newsletters. Meanwhile, my experience with gmail is that I sometimes miss individual emails from human beings because they got caught in the spam filter. This state of affairs doesn't make email useless, but the system does seem to favor sophisticated bulk senders with tons of resources to devote to the problem over real people just trying to communicate something important.

by pstack 13y ago

pixl97 13y ago

>It has been many years since people actually suffered from the weight of zillions of spam messages in their inbox. And this is part of what makes email close to useless these days. Outside of your own organization you have no idea if your mail was delivered or black holed at a server somewhere never to be heard from again. Too many servers still do the wrong thing, accept and delete, rather than reject at HELO. You wouldn't care much if the post office dropped all the ads for $5.99 pizza before they got to your post box, but if your bills got lost regularly you would be unhappy, and that's the problem with email.

benihana 13y ago
>And this is part of what makes email close to useless these days. Outside of your own organization you have no idea if your mail was delivered or black holed at a server somewhere never to be heard from again. I work in the domain of email and I'm not really sure how you came to this conclusion. I work on an internal team at a fairly well known e-commerce site and because of a few simple metrics, we have very high confidence in our mail being delivered. Not only marketing newsletters but also transactional emails like receipts and shipping notifications.
- greenyoda 13y ago
  I'll second that. I've been using e-mail since the 1980s and have never had a problem with receiving a legitimate e-mail. Banks and other businesses always tell you to add their notification addresses to your contact list to avoid their messages being marked as spam, but I've never found this to be necessary.
- wl 13y ago
  Speaking for myself, you've got reliable delivery for the kinds of emails that matter least to users. I really don't care to receive most "transactional" emails and I definitely don't care about newsletters. Meanwhile, my experience with gmail is that I sometimes miss individual emails from human beings because they got caught in the spam filter. This state of affairs doesn't make email useless, but the system does seem to favor sophisticated bulk senders with tons of resources to devote to the problem over real people just trying to communicate something important.