Everyone Has Email. Nobody Uses It Right

I dislike this whole genre of “everybody is doing x wrong”. The argument almost always boils down to “I’m super smart and everyone else is an idiot”. Maybe other people just have different needs and preferences?

> Facebook can shut down tomorrow. Twitter can rebrand itself into oblivion. But email? Email is forever.

Yet author is using Gmail, curious. Even if Google doesn't shut down, there have been many cases of unexplained account terminations.

I also wonder if author ever heard of identity management and SSO.

Thanks Claude, for the overly bland article!

The prompt author removed all the em-dashes but left all the other llm tells. Oops.

> You can't DM famous people on Instagram and expect a response, but send them a thoughtful email and suddenly you're having a conversation.

Easy to find email addresses of famous people are unlikely to respond to you to say the least.

Wishful thinking, and a little out of touch. Outside of North America and western Europe, email never became a "forever" technology, because most people got online after its heyday. Here in Europe, social email (along with social SMS) is now almost fully a thing of the past. And even for work and admin, the email address has now been dethroned as primary ID by the phone number. It's not clear where this ends but the direction of travel is unmistakable.

I always felt like using email in a form of inbox and folders is wrong because for me 99% of emails (and sms) is one-sided and from same bunch of senders. Newsletters, receipts, confirmations, ads, etc. Yet, when i tried to find an email client that works like modern messengers or android sms reader, i didn't find any popular free app that gets it.

None of this is particularly insightful, but that brings up an interesting point: when people are inducted in a new job, they are not trained in the company's workflow and conventions, yet expected to be productive. Cal Newport's written on this in "A World without Email".

Actually pretty good advice in this article. I work in an email-heavy industry and my advice would have been exactly the same. I have to declare email bankruptcy once a year though, so I might not do it properly.

“All official things come through email — documents, confirmations, receipts, that thing you need to prove you actually paid for something three years ago.”

…although Amazon recently put an end to that…

Everyone has blogs. Nobody uses them correctly.

Today, everyone's least favorite aspect of recipe blogs has taken root in the rest of the blogosphere: massive prefaces talking about the history of email, personal experiences, and images which evoke mood while failing to convey information.

And really, the sanctimonious preachiness of this sort of article is such a turn-off. Why put up with this sort of condescension from someone who regurgitates facts about history instead of someone who considers history as the thing people lived through?

    Back then, email was just a way for researchers to leave messages for each other on the same computer network. 

    It wasn't instant. 

Yes it was.

    It wasn't fancy.

You think that email wasn't "fancy" to the first people to use it?

    It was just... useful. And that usefulness is exactly why it survived.

I bet you could find like four or five other examples of things that lasted a long time because they were useful.

Why write an ellipsis here? Is it to simulate your thinking about the next word? Like you want us to "hear" you "saying" this sentence? Who is that for?

Haha. Nice strong history lesson but sadly out of date. (Say someone using email for 40+ years).

Email is dead. Its been taken over by spammers and AI slop.

We're walking back into a world of walled gardens. Contact is not via IM or email but only via trusted, secured networks.

My old PCs now run AI Agents telling all the crap emailers to use the contact form on our site. Life is too short for crap emails.

Don't tell me how to live my life?

Do you remember a time when not all articles were written by LLMs?

Email is the worst of all worlds.

> btw do you remember the time when there were NO selfies on the internet

X-Face was designed in the 1980s as a way to include selfies in email and Usenet message. ;) I didn't start using the internet until after then.

> But the Gmail address I got when I was in university? Still works.

My email address is older than GMail. Through my domain. Google can shut down tomorrow just as easily as Facebook.

> The first email was sent in 1971 by a guy named Ray Tomlinson, who also decided that we should use the @ symbol to separate usernames from host names.

That's ... not quite true. That was the first ARPANET network mail, but email is older. Eg, https://www.multicians.org/thvv/mail-history.html describing MAIL on CTSS in the mid-1960s.

if you can't find time to write your article, I don't have time to read it

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