Most replies are very nice. People really feel seen and appreciated when I compliment them on their cool project and nice write up.
Even if no one replies, I would still send the occasional email, because I want independent websites/blogs to thrive and stay.
Because Slack is so frictionless, there was no barrier asking anything, including questions that were answered the day prior in the main channel or questions that are right in our searchable API docs. It also allows anyone to message, which also seems nice on the surface, but again, it ends up being awful.
Another example is that one of our customer's CS folks Slacks us their questions about their internal system, which we obviously have nothing to do with. This has been consistently like once a month for 2.5 years...
Email adds friction. Even though it's not much, I've found that customers of ours that used to be very bad signal to noise ratio who we've transitioned to email support have since reached out less with more valid support requests.
Customers that always preferred email over Slack were always like that. I assume that's actually because they're bigger companies that are waiting on five internal meetings before doing anything.
I really like Slack of internal communication, but email for external all the way.
Reminds me of [0]
I love email and postcards. It's a bummer that the signal to noise ratio is so high with junk mail, but that makes genuine correspondence even more special. Long replies make you sit with someone else's perspective without interrupting longer than you would in normal conversation and I think that changes things dramatically.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message
The thing I really dislike are brands using a phone number to let you know about sales etc. No, I don't actually need a new carpet this week.
There are many times I want to share longer, personal stories with friends, and sometimes those evolve into philosophical discussions about human nature. Other times it could be travelogues or lengthy discussions about art, e.g. my friends and I might go to museums and share our experiences over email, listing our favorite works and why.
I suppose I’m nostalgic for the epistolary culture of the Victorian era. Long-form emails encourage the kind of reflection people once found in diaries and letters. I’m grateful to have found friends who share an appreciation for that virtue, but I consider that more of a miracle than anything else.
I've considered doing this a few times, but have to admit I've never actually got round to sending people appreciative emails, maybe this blog post is the prompt I need.
There's a lot of makers on HN, has anyone here ever received emails about things they made?
I used to be fairly active on r/generative, someone once DM'd me to show me a pen-plot they'd made based off of something I'd made, and it made my whole week.
I've been tempted to put my email address directly on my personal site but just assumed I'd be flooded with automated spam. How have you found it?
But I also need to coordinate with folks with respect to conference meetings and the like so my email is pretty public.
Another way I've seen elsewhere is to use a human-language explanation of how to build email address, something like this: "To get my email address, combine my first name (John) with my birth year (2000), separated by dash (-), and add email provider (@gmail.com)".
Email, as a medium, prompts us to think (at least for a few seconds), not "generate human tokens". Sure, we may feel being "communicative" or "productive" while chatting or Slack, but (in my experience) it is not always the case.
Last week I saw and photographed a sticker with street art near my office. I tried tracking down the artist (he was from a neighboring country), found him and tried to find some contact info. I emailed him if he knew how his art reached my city. He answered that the art piece on the sticker was something he created 30 years ago for a festival and that - apparently - an unknown person made stickers using his art.
Sending a short email does not take a lot of time, but it's very rewarding when the other party answers.
i've been administering a couple personal servers by email as well; they each run a small LLM and read emails sent to them, with a strict allowlist they can handle quite a lot of basic tasks: i've locked myself out of ssh from this ip please unban it, please email me when security logs are strange, what is the current status of the services on your server, etc.
It feels somewhat hacked together (because, largely, it is); and there are significantly more bots than people using it (which is somewhat self-fulfilling).
But when I read the leaked/disclosed emails from founders during tech's boom in the late 00-s and early 10-s, I'm left feeling like: this is kinda nice.
You don't need to write long prose, email chains are reasonably self-contained, can include practically anyone and since nobody seems to have a total dominance on mail clients; they pretty much stick to the lowest common denominator. (though, HTML seems to be very much accepted behaviour for email clients, even though it was NOT when I grew up).
So, in the end, it's the safest medium to reach the most people, and incidentally it's also the most "comfy" in that I can optimise my own experience of email if I want to. Nobody cares if you use outlook/gmail/thunderbird/mutt or whatever. It's just email.
This is a pretty strong contrast to the modern web which pretty much requires Chrome or modern messengers which require/enforce their own first-party clients. Even if they happen to support federation (like Teams) which isn't a given.
Sadly my company decided the Gmail web interface was the only approved way to access email and blocked my email client (and all others). I probably check email once a month now to see if my invoice has been accepted, and ignore the hundreds of unread emails.
It's amazing how big a reach a well crafted and intelligent email has.
Outdated, and in need of replacing? Unfit for the position? A poor choice?
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WTF are you trying to say? Are you for or against email? You say it's awful, then say it's amazing, I'm confused.
In the boomer sense of "go to the store and ask if they need help".
Trump "pushes" his way into things (because he's a disgusting bully), but it largely works.
I think the parent meant it in this way, that email pushes its way into peoples private box, but this is probably same as actually sending a letter to someone.
I was basically working independently on a teaching task. But there was one coworker who had been there for a long time and was working more in outreach. She told me to install four(!) different instant messaging apps -- which I didn't do because while her job involved a lot of communicating with third parties, mine didn't. Besides, she was not my boss (formally - although I think she thought she kinda was. In any event, she did have a lot of influence on my actual supervisor.)
She insisted that that's mandatory for me to which I countered that the whole professional world works on email just fine, as far as non-internal communication is concerned. She started screaming at me in my own office how I had betrayed her by agreeing to install the apps but then didn't do it. I didn't think I agreed because I found the idea ridiculous from the get go. Anyway - I stayed calm and said we should talk again when she was calmer, too.
I later found out that she then schemed behind my back to have me laid off. Which obviously worked.
I must have really rubbed her the wrong way. But in retrospect, I'm really happy to have moved on to better places since.