It’s not that I am a youngster shunning it for snapchat or tiktok etc., but I have come to realize that I basically stopped using email, other than as a (bad) 2fa solution and notification service (and the odd mailing list).
Even at work it has become basically a pure notification service for the internal platform and a place to send the odd document or request to a 3rd party…
I realize that I am probably living in a bubble in that regard, but I actually recently met people reasonably tech affine who claimed they don’t even have an email address?!
So for a while I have been thinking of just configuring an one-way email to XMPP forwarding service (with auto-response) and be done with email ;)
How do you feel about email? Is it still important for your daily communication?
Edit: So a few days later I guess the summary is:
- Many people still use it for work / unversity (only);
- Some people still really use it a lot, but mainly as a “since everything else sucks even more” option;
- Quite a few (but probably still a minority) are like me and effectively stopped using email.
It’s true that email isn’t perfect, but it’s the one common thing me and my friends use. I would be very happy if everyone started using XMPP or Matrix, but that isn’t happening. Most people I know are too used to Facebook’s or Instagram’s ecosystem and I’m not about to meet them halfway and start using WhatsApp or something dodgy like that. So, email it is.
As creaky as email is, if you’re trying to send a message between two or more people it is one of the few universal forms of message sending these days. Everyone has their favored platform with some people swearing off platforms for one reason or another, but email is constantly available to everyone. And if someone gets excluded because they don’t have an email address - well, that’s kind of their problem. Very different from a platform like Facebook where there are legitimate reasons to not want to have anything to do with them.
Agreed, but my question was more about how often do you still really do or need that practically? For me that has become maybe once in a quarter year or so?
Daily. During the work day, nearly hourly. Besides person-to-person communication, a lot of our backend systems at my workplace use it as an easy, cheap way to implement alerts.
Yes that is what I meant with “notifications”. I still have that a lot too, but that could be easily replaced with something else or forwarded to another service.
While this is all true, email’s universality is a feature that no other service gets close to. It’s like English: it’s messy and there are better alternatives, but none of them have the same sort of crucial momentum.
I use this mainly as a justification to use it as communication channel in school with classmates. Mostly, when I represent the classroom.
Everynyan is provided with one in school if they dont have one and most school communications happen there, the rest in the website.
I use it all the time as correspondence with friends. I find email is a really great way to discuss different ideas that you want to think through. I find writing things down forces you to think through them more than when you’re chatting with somebody in real time. So, it’s a really great medium for any thoughtful discussion.
I use email a lot both privately and professionally. I don’t think it’s obsolete at all. In email, I still adhere to several formalities (like Dear… and signing my name etc) which is I think a nice tradition and I also pay more attention to correct grammar and punctuation, full sentences etc. I think it should be kept as a channel of more formal correspondance. It is also decentralised by design which is great. With a few updated standards, strong e2e encryption could be built into the email infrastructure by default. I hope we will reach this at some point
I like and still use email because it’s an asynchronous system that is hard to find these days.
That is, it’s not ordered into conversations like with chat apps, but into simple, individual mail.
The email client can support tree ordering for replies too.
You can use both.
Yeah, true.
What I mean is, that even then, it’s asynchronous: I can reply to the not-latest mail from you without it feeling awkward, like it would in a chat app
I use email. I hate sending texts.
Same here, I only use it as a 2fa or for signup confirms, not personal communication. Pretty much all my friends use matrix, signal, or since I live in the US, facebook messenger.
As a university student I use email to communicate with my professors and the administration. Outside of that I use it to share files with other students, but that is by means of google drive links usually. Most other communication I do among the student body is over discord lol.
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E-mail is my main means of one-on-one communication. For personal communications, only alternative that non-tech-affine people in this area use would be WhatsApp, which I don’t have and don’t want to get. I’m currently looking into alternatives to e-mail, but setting these up will take time, and it’ll be only with those few people who are willing to use an unfamiliar technology just to communicate with me… For paperwork I have to submit, e-mail is usually the expected way of submitting it unless you’re expected to go there and hand it in.
I’m actually quite surprised to see a question like this come up. poVoq, if you’d like to tell, what do you use instead of e-mail?
EDIT: Just saw mae’s comment. I also use e-mail to communicate with professors and the administration.
I am long out of University, but yes I have heard that email is still common there. For work related stuff there is the odd email (on an company account) here and there, but to my distress most communication has moved to MS-Teams & WhatsApp (on a company phone).
Privately I mostly use Threema/Telegram/Discord (forced to) and (by choice) XMPP/IRC with a bit of Matrix here and there if I can’t avoid it (but the latter seems mostly dead anyways). And I guess I could use Signal if I wanted.
I use email through Delta Chat 😁
I regularly correspond with multiple people through multiple email addresses I use for various purposes. Literally all the time, lol.
It’s good for documents and such. It’s also the only federated service that’s universal.
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True, I use emails a lot less now. But it is still somewhat essential, I would say. Most of my communication happens on XMPP, Matrix, Discord, Signal, Telegram, and little on WhatsApp.
Good post, though, OP!
