Which isn't to say that all the advantages you list for email are not true. They are. It's just that most people will shy away from an otherwise-decent solution if it has terrible UX.
Insecure in what manner?
To me it's no more insecure than a VCS - sure, anyone could edit anyone else's code, but version history was always there.
(but it's read-only, there's no rebasing, people still use old-school e-mail clients)
I think the ideal is the approach you get with discussion forums: Create a set of boards organized around topics, and place named, threaded conversations within those boards. People can join a board, in which case they will be able to get a list of new conversations related to that board's topic. They can then subscribe to just the conversations that interest them, and unsubscribe from ones that cease to be of interest.
The archive on a mailing list is a second-class artifact, typically hosted via HTTP, and usually people don't care about the quality of the archive's UX.
The structural organization on NNTP is also a first-class artifact that everyone can refer to. A mailing list will go straight into everyone's inbox, with all their other mail, until they filter it away.
News groups and mailing lists don't scale super well, in that, when you subscribe, you then get sent everything. Maybe not terrible for the 5-10 emails a day from my kid's playgroup's email list, but absolutely awful for trying to keep up with a team of 100 people.
https://superuser.com/questions/458136/thunderbird-watch-or-...
Or use digests, mail filters/folders and a convention for tagging message subjects.
Once you get down to the individual conversation level, the fine-grained management bits you talk about are not good UX, they're band-aids for dealing with bad UX.
1. Killfiles
2. Contextually-scoped lists. If a topic is of limited concern yet intrusive, split it to a separate list. Moderation and management may be necessary. Technical teams should be scoped correspondingly. 100+ team members is excessive, 3-15 far more typical.
Internal Q&A, forums, and email all work because you can have long-form conversations on them but an important consideration is discoverability. If a new user wants to find out why X is true for some service, they'd better be able to do that without interrupting someone else.
VSCode is somehow fast despite running a bunch of linters/compilers/language-servers while typing, and similarly built on web tech, and ... in case of a JS/NodeJS/TS project it also handles tens/hundreds of thousands of files with ease, oh with full text search.)
The big win was the ability to rapidly subscribe and unsubscribe from lists as you needed them. The actual corporate email distro lists were handled by a dedicated IT team who insisted on tickets for everything, so most people just added filter rules to their inboxes instead of dealing with that mess.
As for S/MIME, certificates are a pain to deal with for most people and all they really care about is transport-level, not E2E encryption.
However, you can't "just use email" -- Email's threading model is great for asynchronous work, but it is poor for synchronous communication and also doesn't support modern features that make it easier to communicate ideas efficiently (shared history, markdown formatting, image previews, emoji reactions, etc.). It's essential to be able to have (semi)synchronous written conversations with people you're working with, especially if you don't want to spend your days burning out on video calls.
This is why we created Zulip -- it's designed as a real-time communication tool with email's threading model and all the nice features of modern chat apps that email lacks. And the reading user experience is actually a lot better than email, because Zulip provides is designed with the goal of saving time when prioritizing, skimming, reading, and replying to conversations. It's also 100% open source software (not open core!).
>shared history Not if you have a mailing list, and then going off the record is as easy as removing the mailing list from the CC field.
>markdown formatting This is an implementation failure, not really a fundamental problem with email. There is no reason that email clients don't support markdown, except that nobody has ever wanted it. There was someone who made a utility to switch markdown to regular MIME email, but just as a proof of concept. It works.
>Image previews I assume what you mean by this is an inline thumbnail that expands when you click on it? Again, there's nothing about email that prevents it, it's just the way email clients are. That could be fixed
>emoji reactions Okay, that's fair, there's no way to do this in email, short of sending a single emoji back. On the other hand, I think everyone would agree that this is more of a nice to have feature, than a necessary one, and one that really only makes sense in the world of quick, back and forth chat programs.
[1] https://begriffs.com/posts/2020-07-16-generating-mime-email....
Personally though I have nothing to complain about with slack. It has threading. It only has one level threading but that might actually be a good thing because we slack with non tech people too. One thread is sometimes hard for them to grasp. Make that a regular threading model and they will utterly get lost. You can see how that completely breaks down with emails in most places.
We use slack both for synchronous and asynchronous communication. It's all about the culture and what people expect. Not really different from email. Remember the people that send you another email if you didn't answer their first one after 5 minutes?
Group chats you can just link to in a ticket instead of having to paste and reformat from a large email conversation? Priceless!
Markdown is not necessarily required. Most good email clients supported something like it, like actually displaying something like _this_ as italics or * bolded *. It's like saying "but your app doesn't do XML". Yeah well but it does JSON.
Off topic, but this astounds me.
Not trying to be elitist (I'm genuinely curious), but what is it about threads that throws them off?
They seem unrelated to software. I would have thought "non-tech" people would also understand them.
One guess is that there's the mental effort in keeping track of these threads (even when they're literally right in front of you in the interface.
Maybe it's the fact that they're just so used to the whole email chain with 15 levels of quoting old emails that is so common in many companies. Many many people are mentally immobile and unprepared to switch to anything else, once they're used to something. Lifelong learning is not something that is common in every job, like it is in software development.
Again you can't really ask me because I find threading totally awesome.
I have been recommending it right and left to people who don't need federation in their chat system. If there was a clear gateway to federation -- enabling a Matrix room as a Zulip Stream, for instance -- I would enthusiastically recommend it for everyone.
I get you. But also:
- Email doesn't retain context very well. If I dig back through my email I might have all of the emails in a thread, or maybe not.
- Likewise, I can't send someone a link to a previous emailed conversation so it makes for poor documentation. I can forward an individual email, but not the comment in context.
- Email is not easy to index or post up for reference. You can't link it from a wiki or other documentation for example.
An internal mailing list with archiving would solve many of these issues and might be the best option, but it's a slightly different solution.
I didn't realized they removed the email piece... seems like a downgrade. Particularly for projects where you have fairly casual participants.
- Achievable
- Searchable
- Linkable
- Asynchronous
- Accessible
I like using Slack and we use it heavily with my team, but I agree it has issues.
Meanwhile, we've been using mailing lists for established open source projects for years for all of these reasons.
There isn't really much else I don't like about it, I never stop being amazed by how great the keyboard navigation is and how much the "river" of messages improves usability.
I'm intrigued by the Guest option. Do you think it's a good way to communicate with the clients during longer projects?
But yeah for groups you need a mailing list with an archive. It's still better than most IM apps IMO.
> It's still better than most IM apps IMO.
Yes, but you are trading one set of limits for another.
It's a bit surprising that at this point we haven't standardized on something better than essentially IRC versus email.
(Ok not surprising, frustrating)
The necessary conditions are (1) one needs to learn it. Too many features are making UX non-intuitive. (2) fast connection to e-mail server (3) ms exchange on the server, some features only work there.
Looking at the sieve website it seems quite a few desktop and web mail clients do have support for it either out of the box or as an add-on. So I would say that having this functionality is more on the "common" side than "borderline unique".
Sieve might be supported by many email clients, but is pretty much nonexistent in corporate email.
Actually, if someone points me to one hosted email provider that does support it, I'd be glad - I was wondering about trying it out but nobody supports it.
Not sure but unlikely. It works in Exchange for 20 years now, that RFC was written in 2008.
> having this functionality is more on the "common" side than "borderline unique".
The complete UX makes it borderline unique. Available out of the box, has a nice GUI, and is reliable in practice.
I'm just a dumb machine operator that uses Outlook at work, Fastmail for myself, and Gmail because I'm an idiot too, and really can't tell the difference.
Outlook also has been chasing the flat look fad which is against usability. Most of the others are too so it is hard to fault them, but I still wish they would have the guts to say this fad is wrong...
Once they are all running and you are used to the ui quirks they all work well enough.
I've used Outlook in several organisations over the years, and start time has always been in the order of 5-10s.
Install Thunderbird[0] and use it for a week. You'll be able to tell the difference very quickly.
A fair point. As someone who has used both Outlook (professionally) and Thunderbird (personally) for decades (IIRC, the oldest message in my Thunderbird email store is from 1996), calendaring in Thunderbird isn't as robust as in Outlook and some of the other weaknesses you mention are absolutely valid.
However, I'd say that many of the advantages of Outlook that you mention are more related to better integration of Outlook into Exchange back ends than to the Outlook client.
If Exchange had better IMAP support and appropriate plugins for Thunderbird, Thunderbird would be vastly superior to Outlook in most respects.
As it is, Thunderbird is already vastly superior to any web-based MUA[0], including OWA[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_client
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook_on_the_web
Edit: Clarified Outlook/Exchange integration vs. Outlook as client.
On the other hand, yes, Outlook Web Access is hilariously bad. It's hard to understand how Microsoft flubbed it so bad considering that their consumer outlook.com has a radically better webmail. Different teams, obviously, but you'd think they would have shared notes.
All in all, it feels a lot to me like Microsoft had a really good MUA in 2003 and hasn't done much with it since, while Mozilla had a not-quite-done-yet MUA in 2003 and hasn't done much with it since. Both feel bolted together out of spare parts but in a way that's subjectively a bit different.
I asked our biz dev guy who had been trained as a lawyer what to do and he told me to the same thing my accountant does with my taxes: email an encrypted PDF as an attachment and share the password by a separate channel.
Even with the best organization (old content deleted), I don't want to wade through the conversations about it or all the other noise. Chat is temporal, the discussion about something like "should x be updated" is immediately irrelevant after the decision is made.
Slack search for <insert error name here> is high-value in historical context that's tough to replicate elsewhere. All at once, you learn if anyone's ever asked about the error before, and if so, see the conversation on resolution.
Email is far worse, in fact, because:
* Everyone has a unique view
* Unless there are lots of cc-everyone style emails, you might not even have anything to find. (And cc-everyone sucks for 100 other reasons.)
* You can't find anything predating the start of your employment
The biggest issue with searching both chat and email is the absence of a result doesn't help: it's possible it was a private chat, or an email chain that you weren't a part of, but there's no way to tell.
(Side note: A very locked-down wiki isn't any better, but that's a conscious decision rather than default.)
Many companies use Outlook groups. Those are mailing lists.
The important part is we know why a decision was made. Chat logs are not a good archive because there is too much to sort thought that isn't relevant. Better than nothing, but what is really needed is an effort to document why in a place the right people will find it when they need to know.
That said, none of my employers have ever made effective use of this. I don't think open communication is an instinct that most people have.
Chats have the same problem: they aren't searchable by people who weren't in them.
meanwhile https://lkml.org/
Also, even if I am part of the channel, there is no way I can search and locate what I want without knowing the right keyword to search for. Sure, the information is all there, but that only ads to the frustration. Search interfaces in Slack & all are very limited / too broad.
That sounds horrible and very fragile.
> I now need to have a long conversation with legal. How will the service provider handle the content (discussions, screenshots, code snippets) that my team will upload?
Yet you suggest using email where it basically goes (or can be coerced to go) across the internet in plain-text where anyone can read it?
I know of at least one large company that forcibly deletes emails older than N months, as part of their legal retention policy. (I'm assuming it means non-retention to limit exposure to lawsuits.)
That would be problematic for persistent documentation.
I speak as someone who worked for a company where email got archived and then deleted after 6 months, and currently works at a company where everyone only uses Slack, and Slack is purged after 30 days.
They're gonna notice real quick the next time they get sued by somebody clueful enough to subpoena that goldmine.
If not, you are very lucky that you are being sued by people with incompetent attorneys.
The alternative to having a document retention policy is to just have employees delete things in an arbitrary manner. It's not just CYA for leaving inconvenient doc lying around, it's also to ensure the proper retention in the event of a preservation order or public records request.
Some companies go way further than others. One place I worked included "notes of a personal nature (eg, birthday cards)" in the retention policy and let us keep them for a week or two before destruction.
This sets a general policy of deleting documents/emails/etc after $X days. This is really a CYA policy to purge old conversations if a big lawsuit comes down asking for document retention in relation to some scandal, and if its older than $X days you're covered since your standard legal process was followed.
Attorneys who sue or investigate people for a living want everything forever, and those who get sued want to delete email before it arrives.
Email is a great way to get in trouble, as people tend to say dumb things, even about things that they have nothing to do with!
Actually, forced deletion - if users are aware of it of course - is likely to sanitize everyone's practice. Email ain't a backup tool.
That's symptomatic of people doing the most silly things and then blame the failures on their tools.
It can even serve as real-time communication for #random and other such work-adjacent channels.
The advantage over just copying everything to a mailing list is that most conversations aren't worth archiving, so having conversations be opt-in after the fact keeps the signal-to-noise ratio much higher than it would otherwise be.
We're still a very small platform, but since we're completely bootstrapped and grew 34x year-over-year in the past year, we're not going anywhere. :-)
Adding a distribution list to an email thread is almost exactly like choosing a Slack channel to type into, except you no longer have the mess of needing to share and re-share messages and threads across channels. You can just add multiple distribution lists.
You can also subscribe and unsubscribe from distribution lists and set up filters for them, which is basically like joining and leaving Slack channels based on your interests, except it gives you much more control over what you want to read and when.
After a archive-worthy discussion in email, you forward the thread to "[email protected]". The script will parse the email chain and generate a static web page hosted on a local server.
Unfortunately there isn't any such thing as "forwarding an email thread", at least not currently. If you hit the forward button in your email client it will only forward the last email in the thread, which sometimes contains the entire thread as quoted reply text, but only in situations where each person has only replied to the most recent email in the thread. Some email clients also truncated the quoted reply text after a certain number of messages, and it's not generally parsable.
Our email archival product uses a G Suite add-on for this reason, which provides the same benefits as OAuth but works on a thread-by-thread basis. I think Outlook extensions work the same way, but I'm not 100% sure on that.
Actually technically Gmail does have a little known "forward thread" button that's hidden in one of the dropdowns, but it doesn't work that well. (Which you'll see if you try it on any longer thread.)
Mailing lists have for years offered mailing list archives that you can read directly in your client, exactly as if the messages had been hitting your inbox from the beginning. The bigger problem with email is that messages are not as easily addressable, unlike links on the Web.
You can format email messages for display on the web and generate permalinks for each message. E.g. look at what we do for https://www.prettyfwd.com. I haven't yet added a JS snippet to autoscroll to a specific message if you pass it in the UUID for that message as a URL parameter, but it's been on my TODO list for a while.
Example thread, where each message is formatted for the web and has a UUID: https://www.prettyfwd.com/t/5XVkc401RiCTO9hwsSRziQ
The other problem with most mailing list archives is that they look terrible and have poor readability, poor SEO, and generally terrible lighthouse scores. Whereas I think we score perfect 100s across the board, albeit only 99 on mobile perf because we don't prerender.
Everything you have in your archives will be taken out context, misinterpreted, used against you in court.
That's too-sweeping a statement [0]:
1. Privilege attaches only to communications in the course of seeking legal advice.
2. Privilege is waived — and thus the emails are discoverable by adversaries and admissible in court — if people outside the decision-making group are in the conversation.
3. Privilege doesn't attach if the lawyer is functioning as a business executive or -advisor.
4. Privilege won't apply if the conversation is determined to be part of a crime or fraud.
All that said: If a lawyer is involved in the conversation, then the company's litigation counsel will almost-automatically withhold the emails from being produced to an adversary and will list them on a "privilege log." That will often set up an ancillary court fight over whether the emails should be produced to the adversary. In that ancillary fight, the judge might end up reviewing the emails "in camera," i.e., without the adversary seeing them, to decide whether the privilege applies — and depending on the content of the withheld emails, having the judge read the emails could do as much damage to the company's case as anything.
[0] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/attorney-client-priv...
The real answer is: just fucking use email. Why is email not one of the options suggested in the TFA? It's universally available, durable, allows long-form conversation and thoughtful deliberation, doesn't tell you that "someone is typing," and offers you the luxury of checking it at a set interval only a few times per day.
The way many organizations have collectively abandoned email in favor of instant messaging is a travesty.