I am begging people to stop hard-wrapping text. Invariably I will view it on a screen that is a different width than yours, and then all the text is either weirdly narrow or it double-wraps and...
I am begging people to stop hard-wrapping
text.
Invariably I will view it on a screen that is a
different width than yours, and then all the
text is either weirdly narrow or
it
double-wraps and you get one word on every
other
line, which is also annoying to read. The
correct
place to do text layout is client side, where
you
know all the details of the font and screen
width
being used, as well as any relevant accessibility
settings
the reader may have set.
this post is vertically huge for comedic effect but I don't want to make people scroll past it t h e n I w i l l r e s p o n d t o y o u w i t h a s i m i l a r l e v e l o f i l l e g i b i l i t y
Exemplary
this post is vertically huge for comedic effect but I don't want to make people scroll past it
As a fun aside, apparently when a reply is entirely contained in a section block, it doesn't trigger a notification. I double checked my previously read notifications, and this comment is not...
As a fun aside, apparently when a reply is entirely contained in a section block, it doesn't trigger a notification. I double checked my previously read notifications, and this comment is not listed. Neat!
The old fogey in me wants to agree, but I can't. These recommendations are arcane. As much as I would like to make these behavior the standard, they quite simply are not. Worse, they're counter to...
The old fogey in me wants to agree, but I can't. These recommendations are arcane. As much as I would like to make these behavior the standard, they quite simply are not. Worse, they're counter to what everyone else does, which makes the primary point of email - communication - harder than it needs to be.
To put things as succinctly as possible, the defaults of the most popular email clients are the opposite of what this document wants, and as such you will be the odd one out unless your email needs are entirely within an insular group of people.
Yeah, it's painfully clear to me that the author of this article does not work in or interface with any profession that requires email as the primary mode of communication. Moving to plaintext for...
Yeah, it's painfully clear to me that the author of this article does not work in or interface with any profession that requires email as the primary mode of communication.
Moving to plaintext for my work would be atrocious and a dramatic drop in my quality of life and ability to get work done.
A succinct and accurate description of 95% of what I’ve read by Drew DeVault! I skimmed the article, wasn’t quite sure if it was modern and out of touch or if it was 30 years old, and then saw the...
The old fogey in me wants to agree, but I can't. These recommendations are arcane. As much as I would like to make these behavior the standard, they quite simply are not.
A succinct and accurate description of 95% of what I’ve read by Drew DeVault!
I skimmed the article, wasn’t quite sure if it was modern and out of touch or if it was 30 years old, and then saw the SourceHut link at the bottom and it all fell into place. The choice to put both a tilde and a slash in the contact email address at the bottom feels like a particularly on-brand rejection of common usage and de facto standards.
This is really the #1 reason to disable HTML if you care at all about your privacy. As soon as that unique invisible pixel renders, the sender knows you've looked at the email, and you've just...
Virtually all HTML emails sent by marketers include identifiers in links and inline images which are designed to extract information about you and send it back to the sender.
This is really the #1 reason to disable HTML if you care at all about your privacy. As soon as that unique invisible pixel renders, the sender knows you've looked at the email, and you've just confirmed you have a functional email address and not a dead one.
That is true, but the tracker is an image that is downloaded, so simply disabling images (which Gmail does by default, IIRC) is enough to stop them. (Did you mean to make this a top-level comment?)
That is true, but the tracker is an image that is downloaded, so simply disabling images (which Gmail does by default, IIRC) is enough to stop them.
They used to, but in 2013 they began proxying images instead to prevent "email opening" actions being tracked. You can still switch to an "ask to show images" setting instead, though. I don't know...
which Gmail does by default, IIRC
They used to, but in 2013 they began proxying images instead to prevent "email opening" actions being tracked. You can still switch to an "ask to show images" setting instead, though.
I don't know how or if they handle checking if an address is real. It's possible Gmail simply proxies all images, even for fake addresses. However I suspect that Gmail (and all other providers) will still return an error code if you try emailing an address that doesn't exist. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. People mistype email addresses all the time, and the sender knowing they need to fix the issue could help prevent a lot of miscommunications.
Many company email providers, universities and the like actually don't do this, to avoid spammers/scammers/scripts from figuring out what email adresses are real and not. It's a pain for us...
However I suspect that Gmail (and all other providers) will still return an error code if you try emailing an address that doesn't exist.
Many company email providers, universities and the like actually don't do this, to avoid spammers/scammers/scripts from figuring out what email adresses are real and not.
It's a pain for us humans, but necessary because of the spam-hell that poor filtering provides (and the sheer amount of work needed to keep a good spam filter up to date and tuned).
I've also seen it filtered to only give the error code for internal emails which somewhat helps whilst being a lot easier to filter as far as spam filtering goes.
I've also seen it filtered to only give the error code for internal emails which somewhat helps whilst being a lot easier to filter as far as spam filtering goes.
I got a bounce back last week from an attempt to send something to a Gmail account, something like “this address doesn’t exist or is inactive” — although it was from my own Gmail address, so I...
I got a bounce back last week from an attempt to send something to a Gmail account, something like “this address doesn’t exist or is inactive” — although it was from my own Gmail address, so I wonder if it wouldn’t have replied with the bounce back if I’d been emailing from an external provider?
I've definitely got 'no such email' bouncebacks, but I suspect they're rate-limited and delayed, which somewhat limits abuse potential. Especially since the sending server, if from one of the...
I've definitely got 'no such email' bouncebacks, but I suspect they're rate-limited and delayed, which somewhat limits abuse potential.
Especially since the sending server, if from one of the bigwigs, is authenticated and thus can just silently dump them if they suspect abuse.
Nah, I just felt that was the prime reason which doesn't seem too arcane. Most emails degrade poorly without images anyway so I've found degrading all the way to text a net win.
Nah, I just felt that was the prime reason which doesn't seem too arcane. Most emails degrade poorly without images anyway so I've found degrading all the way to text a net win.
I feel like the point on bottom posting is apples and oranges. IMO the quotation of the chain is not for the same reasons as you'd quote particular pieces of text in the email body. To me, it's...
I feel like the point on bottom posting is apples and oranges. IMO the quotation of the chain is not for the same reasons as you'd quote particular pieces of text in the email body. To me, it's more of a record of the past chain, so that only any given email in said chain you can retrieve the entire rest of the text.
Most if not all modern email clients collapse said quoted text so you'd never see it, but it can be useful when using email for papertrailing something. I see people still quote pieces of the original email if needed. It's not either-or.
The wrapping recommendation is just inane. This only made sense when most clients didn't automatically wrap text, but they do. Even terminal ones. It's not rocket science.
I do this for myself for many of the reasons listed. But it's a personal choice. I'd much rather move away from email altogether for a more secure messaging standard. At one place I worked, we...
I do this for myself for many of the reasons listed. But it's a personal choice.
I'd much rather move away from email altogether for a more secure messaging standard. At one place I worked, we moved from email to Slack for internal comms, and it was much more pleasant to use, easier to keep organized, and more secure. I don't want the world to run on Slack, but I'd love to see email supplanted by an interoperable open protocol that supports similar features.
Maybe I'm too used to tech-fields, but every place I've worked has had a combination of the two, always. Email and a chat messaging system I mean - e.g. Teams, Slack, Google Chat etc. When you say...
Maybe I'm too used to tech-fields, but every place I've worked has had a combination of the two, always. Email and a chat messaging system I mean - e.g. Teams, Slack, Google Chat etc.
When you say internal communication, dyou mean like the day to day quick messages, essentially as if you're speaking with a person but virtually, took place via EMAIL?!?!
Before anyone listen-here-young-whippersnapper's me, I'm almost 31, unless this was 20 years ago that just seems beyond inconvenient and inefficient to me.. glad your workplace moved away from that!
I looked it up, and Slack was founded in 2013. If my math is right, you were 20 then, and I assume you were in college. So I'm not surprised about your experience as you've probably always been in...
I looked it up, and Slack was founded in 2013. If my math is right, you were 20 then, and I assume you were in college. So I'm not surprised about your experience as you've probably always been in a post-slack work environment. Things before that were quite different.
Sorry if this seems whipper-snapper-y. Just to give you some perspective, I'm 20 years older than Google :)
I think you were (slightly) joking about your horror, but for us, email was a real boon. Before that, if you wanted to have asynchronous communication with someone, you either had to either mail a letter or call and leave a message (either with someone else who answered the phone or recorded on an answering machine that might have an actual magnetic tape head in it). So when you look at it from that perspective, email was amazing. Later, we also had things like AOL instant messenger and ICQ, but we mainly used them for synchronous chat because you had to dial in to access them. It wasn't until persistent connections became common (for me this was the dorm LAN in college, then later DSL) that AIM became an effective way to leave someone a message.
I think the heyday for email was really the late 90s and 2000s. It was replacing faxes (but not always), voicemail, and (gasp) paper memos.
As you get into the late 2000s and early 2010s, email is starting to show its limitations, but there are few viable alternatives. Though chat for business did exist before Slack, it's hard to overstate how bad the systems were or how expensive they were. Email was very much the norm for all internal electronic communication in many workplaces.
Around that time, there were some pretty good open source chat tools. We self-hosted RocketChat for several years even after we had Slack because we could use it for export controlled work. For a while there was also HipChat and some others I'm probably forgetting.
I think Slack can be credited for really creating the market for business chat though. They delivered a product that was on another level and have continued to keep it fresh and relevant. Teams and Google Chat are, IMO, still pale imitations. I think most businesses that use them do so because of the ecosystem integration, not out of any sense of them being superior products.
The main reason anybody uses Teams is because they included it for free with pretty much any existing license. If they had charged Slack prices from the beginning, they'd never have been relevant....
because of the ecosystem integration,
The main reason anybody uses Teams is because they included it for free with pretty much any existing license. If they had charged Slack prices from the beginning, they'd never have been relevant. It's amazing how having a defacto-monopoly on office software and near-monopoly on operating systems lets them bludgeon their way into a new sector.
Even now, we opt to pay for Slack and Zoom even though we have Teams because they are that much better.
The only people that like using Teams at work are the bigwigs who have secretaries to do most of their dirty work and mostly use the Sharepoint features. Oh and the people so deep in the Microsoft ecosystem that they think the hybrid integration of Azure and on-prem is remotely reasonable.
In addition to @vord 's list, Slack's thread model (conversation threads) and the way you are notified and replying in threads is much, much better than teams or gchat.
In addition to @vord 's list, Slack's thread model (conversation threads) and the way you are notified and replying in threads is much, much better than teams or gchat.
In no particular order, with a disclaimer that I've not explored Teams too much in-depth to see if there is fearure parity, but Slack put these features forefront and made trivially easy to use....
In no particular order, with a disclaimer that I've not explored Teams too much in-depth to see if there is fearure parity, but Slack put these features forefront and made trivially easy to use.
Cross-linking of posts between public channels and to private channels (hey did you see this)
Workflow tooling (send to X for approval, then send to team Y to do, then return to us, then we pass to team Z)
Subjects and pinning for channels (who's on call? Check the slack subject)
Easy API integration for alerting and said workflows
Per channel notification configuration
Global keyword pings (somebody says 'database' in one of the other channels and I get a ping)
Grouping of channels and PMs together
"Catch up" where it shows all unread content in one go.
It's far faster than Teams.
Search accoss everything is fast and actually works.
Ultimately, much like Tildes, Slack's design decisions foster better discussion.
At the end of the day, it's hard to explain, but most everyone I work with who has given Slack a fair try soon resents having to go back into Teams.
Most everybody who has a decent amount of sense and thinks with their brains and not wallets, you mean. I wish we could go back to Slack (in fact some of us still use it to communicate with...
At the end of the day, it's hard to explain, but most everyone I work with who has given Slack a fair try soon resents having to go back into Teams.
Most everybody who has a decent amount of sense and thinks with their brains and not wallets, you mean. I wish we could go back to Slack (in fact some of us still use it to communicate with external organizations, another fantastic feature of Slack that is clunky in Teams) but the powers that be dictated that we go all in on Teams simply because it was cheaper for our organization. And probably not by much either...
The only thing I like about Teams is that it does have better noise cancellation - far too much background noise and conversations would get picked up in voice chat on Slack that aren't in Teams on the same hardware.
Hah, thanks for the perspective! I definitely know email must have been a huge step forward in communication. I didn't realize I hit the mark do exactly with my '20 years ago' comment, but that's...
Hah, thanks for the perspective! I definitely know email must have been a huge step forward in communication. I didn't realize I hit the mark do exactly with my '20 years ago' comment, but that's pretty much what I meant - essentially that if the parent commenter wasn't talking about their workplace 20 years ago then my (tongue in cheek) horror was justified - aka, who the hell after like, 2018 or so, didn't already utilise a business chat solution?! :p
Yeah, I used ICQ and another service called PowWow, and as I recall you couldn’t really count on receiving a message if you weren’t signed in when it was sent. Sometimes it would be waiting for...
Later, we also had things like AOL instant messenger and ICQ, but we mainly used them for synchronous chat because you had to dial in to access them.
Yeah, I used ICQ and another service called PowWow, and as I recall you couldn’t really count on receiving a message if you weren’t signed in when it was sent. Sometimes it would be waiting for you when you next signed in, sometimes it would show up later on at some point, and sometimes it would just disappear.
With how frustrating Google chat is to use for workplaces that are Google based that force no non internal comms policies people default to email for instant messages and yes it is inconvenient...
With how frustrating Google chat is to use for workplaces that are Google based that force no non internal comms policies people default to email for instant messages and yes it is inconvenient and inefficient.
Lol i just added Google Chat there for completions' sake yeah - it's absolute garbage. I've actually never worked anywhere that didn't use the Google sphere, but every one of them also used a chat...
Lol i just added Google Chat there for completions' sake yeah - it's absolute garbage. I've actually never worked anywhere that didn't use the Google sphere, but every one of them also used a chat messaging system like Slack because of how crap Google chat is :p
A markup language is perfectly adequate for most messaging apps, and fixes the privacy loophole. Better yet, it keeps marketers from somehow bloating plain text messages of a few characters into...
A markup language is perfectly adequate for most messaging apps, and fixes the privacy loophole. Better yet, it keeps marketers from somehow bloating plain text messages of a few characters into 10MB of HTML garbage.
Bold, italics, unordered lists, ordered lists, tables, and image embeds (optional). All you really need. XMPP seems possibly promising in this space, but I do wish we had a client that lacked the 'instant' part of instant messenger. Email's position as the successor (kind of) of snail mail makes the response cadence much more manageable, since most people don't expect a response for hours or days.
This entire conversation makes me wonder, semi-related: for countries interested in reducing climate impacts with legislation, why haven't we seen outright junk mail bans? You could easily move it all to email and it wouldn't matter, aside from the most extremely old and set in their ways. I don't know about you, but I get dozens of kilograms of unwanted catalogs and other nonsense per year. I can't imagine how much USPS could cut back if the flow stopped to just wanted spam, or if they created an easy way to block it.
Yes, I agree. It's worth noting that things like markdown are basically a formalization of conventions that formed to increase the expressiveness of plain text email. I've been emphasizing text...
A markup language is perfectly adequate for most messaging apps, and fixes the privacy loophole. Better yet, it keeps marketers from somehow bloating plain text messages of a few characters into 10MB of HTML garbage.
Yes, I agree. It's worth noting that things like markdown are basically a formalization of conventions that formed to increase the expressiveness of plain text email. I've been emphasizing text with * and _ since long before markdown was a thing. Even emojis (the ones constructed from keyboard punctuation) have their roots in adding tone signals to email. So they are the evolution of written language to cope with the limitations and exploit the benefits of "plain text" messages.
As for junk mail, like all spam, it exists because 1) it's profitable for somebody and 2) it's hard as the service provider to categorize the spam from the ham. I suspect that as the boomers and older genXers die off, you'll see an end because junk mail is truly irrelevant to younger folks.
USPS still depends on bulk mail for 20+% of its revenues, though this is gradually being diminished by digital and mobile advertising. Bulk mail dropped by 11% last year just because of increased...
USPS still depends on bulk mail for 20+% of its revenues, though this is gradually being diminished by digital and mobile advertising. Bulk mail dropped by 11% last year just because of increased printing costs for advertisers, so who knows - it might wither away on its own.
...bottom-quoting is frustrating but we've well-since lost that fight and i've let it go in the interest of interoperability, although i still take the time to cull redundant signatures and...
...bottom-quoting is frustrating but we've well-since lost that fight and i've let it go in the interest of interoperability, although i still take the time to cull redundant signatures and irrelevant discourse from my replies...
I am begging people to stop hard-wrapping
text.
Invariably I will view it on a screen that is a
different width than yours, and then all the
text is either weirdly narrow or
it
double-wraps and you get one word on every
other
line, which is also annoying to read. The
correct
place to do text layout is client side, where
you
know all the details of the font and screen
width
being used, as well as any relevant accessibility
settings
the reader may have set.
But what if I like that "just copy and pasted from an OCR'd PDF vibe in my communications?
this post is vertically huge for comedic effect but I don't want to make people scroll past it
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As a fun aside, apparently when a reply is entirely contained in a section block, it doesn't trigger a notification. I double checked my previously read notifications, and this comment is not listed. Neat!
Even non-OCR'd pdfs do this when you copy-paste to be fair, it's a pain in the ass lol
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The old fogey in me wants to agree, but I can't. These recommendations are arcane. As much as I would like to make these behavior the standard, they quite simply are not. Worse, they're counter to what everyone else does, which makes the primary point of email - communication - harder than it needs to be.
To put things as succinctly as possible, the defaults of the most popular email clients are the opposite of what this document wants, and as such you will be the odd one out unless your email needs are entirely within an insular group of people.
Yeah, it's painfully clear to me that the author of this article does not work in or interface with any profession that requires email as the primary mode of communication.
Moving to plaintext for my work would be atrocious and a dramatic drop in my quality of life and ability to get work done.
A succinct and accurate description of 95% of what I’ve read by Drew DeVault!
I skimmed the article, wasn’t quite sure if it was modern and out of touch or if it was 30 years old, and then saw the SourceHut link at the bottom and it all fell into place. The choice to put both a tilde and a slash in the contact email address at the bottom feels like a particularly on-brand rejection of common usage and de facto standards.
This is really the #1 reason to disable HTML if you care at all about your privacy. As soon as that unique invisible pixel renders, the sender knows you've looked at the email, and you've just confirmed you have a functional email address and not a dead one.
That is true, but the tracker is an image that is downloaded, so simply disabling images (which Gmail does by default, IIRC) is enough to stop them.
(Did you mean to make this a top-level comment?)
They used to, but in 2013 they began proxying images instead to prevent "email opening" actions being tracked. You can still switch to an "ask to show images" setting instead, though.
I don't know how or if they handle checking if an address is real. It's possible Gmail simply proxies all images, even for fake addresses. However I suspect that Gmail (and all other providers) will still return an error code if you try emailing an address that doesn't exist. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. People mistype email addresses all the time, and the sender knowing they need to fix the issue could help prevent a lot of miscommunications.
Many company email providers, universities and the like actually don't do this, to avoid spammers/scammers/scripts from figuring out what email adresses are real and not.
It's a pain for us humans, but necessary because of the spam-hell that poor filtering provides (and the sheer amount of work needed to keep a good spam filter up to date and tuned).
I've also seen it filtered to only give the error code for internal emails which somewhat helps whilst being a lot easier to filter as far as spam filtering goes.
I got a bounce back last week from an attempt to send something to a Gmail account, something like “this address doesn’t exist or is inactive” — although it was from my own Gmail address, so I wonder if it wouldn’t have replied with the bounce back if I’d been emailing from an external provider?
I've definitely got 'no such email' bouncebacks, but I suspect they're rate-limited and delayed, which somewhat limits abuse potential.
Especially since the sending server, if from one of the bigwigs, is authenticated and thus can just silently dump them if they suspect abuse.
Nah, I just felt that was the prime reason which doesn't seem too arcane. Most emails degrade poorly without images anyway so I've found degrading all the way to text a net win.
I feel like the point on bottom posting is apples and oranges. IMO the quotation of the chain is not for the same reasons as you'd quote particular pieces of text in the email body. To me, it's more of a record of the past chain, so that only any given email in said chain you can retrieve the entire rest of the text.
Most if not all modern email clients collapse said quoted text so you'd never see it, but it can be useful when using email for papertrailing something. I see people still quote pieces of the original email if needed. It's not either-or.
The wrapping recommendation is just inane. This only made sense when most clients didn't automatically wrap text, but they do. Even terminal ones. It's not rocket science.
I do this for myself for many of the reasons listed. But it's a personal choice.
I'd much rather move away from email altogether for a more secure messaging standard. At one place I worked, we moved from email to Slack for internal comms, and it was much more pleasant to use, easier to keep organized, and more secure. I don't want the world to run on Slack, but I'd love to see email supplanted by an interoperable open protocol that supports similar features.
Maybe I'm too used to tech-fields, but every place I've worked has had a combination of the two, always. Email and a chat messaging system I mean - e.g. Teams, Slack, Google Chat etc.
When you say internal communication, dyou mean like the day to day quick messages, essentially as if you're speaking with a person but virtually, took place via EMAIL?!?!
Before anyone listen-here-young-whippersnapper's me, I'm almost 31, unless this was 20 years ago that just seems beyond inconvenient and inefficient to me.. glad your workplace moved away from that!
I looked it up, and Slack was founded in 2013. If my math is right, you were 20 then, and I assume you were in college. So I'm not surprised about your experience as you've probably always been in a post-slack work environment. Things before that were quite different.
Sorry if this seems whipper-snapper-y. Just to give you some perspective, I'm 20 years older than Google :)
I think you were (slightly) joking about your horror, but for us, email was a real boon. Before that, if you wanted to have asynchronous communication with someone, you either had to either mail a letter or call and leave a message (either with someone else who answered the phone or recorded on an answering machine that might have an actual magnetic tape head in it). So when you look at it from that perspective, email was amazing. Later, we also had things like AOL instant messenger and ICQ, but we mainly used them for synchronous chat because you had to dial in to access them. It wasn't until persistent connections became common (for me this was the dorm LAN in college, then later DSL) that AIM became an effective way to leave someone a message.
I think the heyday for email was really the late 90s and 2000s. It was replacing faxes (but not always), voicemail, and (gasp) paper memos.
As you get into the late 2000s and early 2010s, email is starting to show its limitations, but there are few viable alternatives. Though chat for business did exist before Slack, it's hard to overstate how bad the systems were or how expensive they were. Email was very much the norm for all internal electronic communication in many workplaces.
Around that time, there were some pretty good open source chat tools. We self-hosted RocketChat for several years even after we had Slack because we could use it for export controlled work. For a while there was also HipChat and some others I'm probably forgetting.
I think Slack can be credited for really creating the market for business chat though. They delivered a product that was on another level and have continued to keep it fresh and relevant. Teams and Google Chat are, IMO, still pale imitations. I think most businesses that use them do so because of the ecosystem integration, not out of any sense of them being superior products.
The main reason anybody uses Teams is because they included it for free with pretty much any existing license. If they had charged Slack prices from the beginning, they'd never have been relevant. It's amazing how having a defacto-monopoly on office software and near-monopoly on operating systems lets them bludgeon their way into a new sector.
Even now, we opt to pay for Slack and Zoom even though we have Teams because they are that much better.
The only people that like using Teams at work are the bigwigs who have secretaries to do most of their dirty work and mostly use the Sharepoint features. Oh and the people so deep in the Microsoft ecosystem that they think the hybrid integration of Azure and on-prem is remotely reasonable.
My work uses Teams, and I've never used Slack. How is it better?
In addition to @vord 's list, Slack's thread model (conversation threads) and the way you are notified and replying in threads is much, much better than teams or gchat.
In no particular order, with a disclaimer that I've not explored Teams too much in-depth to see if there is fearure parity, but Slack put these features forefront and made trivially easy to use.
Ultimately, much like Tildes, Slack's design decisions foster better discussion.
At the end of the day, it's hard to explain, but most everyone I work with who has given Slack a fair try soon resents having to go back into Teams.
Most everybody who has a decent amount of sense and thinks with their brains and not wallets, you mean. I wish we could go back to Slack (in fact some of us still use it to communicate with external organizations, another fantastic feature of Slack that is clunky in Teams) but the powers that be dictated that we go all in on Teams simply because it was cheaper for our organization. And probably not by much either...
The only thing I like about Teams is that it does have better noise cancellation - far too much background noise and conversations would get picked up in voice chat on Slack that aren't in Teams on the same hardware.
Hah, thanks for the perspective! I definitely know email must have been a huge step forward in communication. I didn't realize I hit the mark do exactly with my '20 years ago' comment, but that's pretty much what I meant - essentially that if the parent commenter wasn't talking about their workplace 20 years ago then my (tongue in cheek) horror was justified - aka, who the hell after like, 2018 or so, didn't already utilise a business chat solution?! :p
Yeah, I used ICQ and another service called PowWow, and as I recall you couldn’t really count on receiving a message if you weren’t signed in when it was sent. Sometimes it would be waiting for you when you next signed in, sometimes it would show up later on at some point, and sometimes it would just disappear.
With how frustrating Google chat is to use for workplaces that are Google based that force no non internal comms policies people default to email for instant messages and yes it is inconvenient and inefficient.
Lol i just added Google Chat there for completions' sake yeah - it's absolute garbage. I've actually never worked anywhere that didn't use the Google sphere, but every one of them also used a chat messaging system like Slack because of how crap Google chat is :p
I still maintain that push email is the worst invention to ever be made in the business sphere.
A markup language is perfectly adequate for most messaging apps, and fixes the privacy loophole. Better yet, it keeps marketers from somehow bloating plain text messages of a few characters into 10MB of HTML garbage.
Bold, italics, unordered lists, ordered lists, tables, and image embeds (optional). All you really need. XMPP seems possibly promising in this space, but I do wish we had a client that lacked the 'instant' part of instant messenger. Email's position as the successor (kind of) of snail mail makes the response cadence much more manageable, since most people don't expect a response for hours or days.
This entire conversation makes me wonder, semi-related: for countries interested in reducing climate impacts with legislation, why haven't we seen outright junk mail bans? You could easily move it all to email and it wouldn't matter, aside from the most extremely old and set in their ways. I don't know about you, but I get dozens of kilograms of unwanted catalogs and other nonsense per year. I can't imagine how much USPS could cut back if the flow stopped to just wanted spam, or if they created an easy way to block it.
Yes, I agree. It's worth noting that things like markdown are basically a formalization of conventions that formed to increase the expressiveness of plain text email. I've been emphasizing text with * and _ since long before markdown was a thing. Even emojis (the ones constructed from keyboard punctuation) have their roots in adding tone signals to email. So they are the evolution of written language to cope with the limitations and exploit the benefits of "plain text" messages.
As for junk mail, like all spam, it exists because 1) it's profitable for somebody and 2) it's hard as the service provider to categorize the spam from the ham. I suspect that as the boomers and older genXers die off, you'll see an end because junk mail is truly irrelevant to younger folks.
USPS still depends on bulk mail for 20+% of its revenues, though this is gradually being diminished by digital and mobile advertising. Bulk mail dropped by 11% last year just because of increased printing costs for advertisers, so who knows - it might wither away on its own.
I love plain text for many things, but email is not one of them. Hyperlinks are ridiculous to give up, imo
...bottom-quoting is frustrating but we've well-since lost that fight and i've let it go in the interest of interoperability, although i still take the time to cull redundant signatures and irrelevant discourse from my replies...