I guess the chat client could do all the e-mail sending from some of their maintainer e-mail servers and not from under the chat participant e-mail. Then we would start losing comaptibility with other e-mail clients though. Although not completely, as we could set Reply-To headers and when another e-mail client replies to [email protected], we could just forward it to the correct e-mail.
An interesting concept indeed.
I guess if you use mailing lists for topics you can subscribe to, and cc'ing people for @mentions inviting them to reply, then yeah! Email can do it all. So why is email considered such a time sink? Because people don't filter conversations coming from the outside. But if they just set up a filter, then literally email is a Slack killer, no?
And even if we had been successful in changing people’s behaviour, the lack of threading made it very difficult to have meaningful, deep conversations about complex subjects anyway. Before you could even fully understand the problem being discussed (let alone find a solution), someone would invariably start a new conversation or reply to a previous discussion that happened earlier in the channel.
Threaded, asynchronous discussions with notifications when someone actually replied to your message are much more useful.
And they can also be freaking decentralized and end-to-end encrypted! Woot!
I am building something like this. Anything like that exist?