It’s a more formal record. Chat channels move along and each have their own limitations around pinned messages that complicate using them for important communication that needs to be referred back to.

Even for collaborating on documents it’s pretty common to mail out a specific “version” of the document as something of a checkpoint and to help when referring to things that may be removed in future versions.

It’s for stuff people want to be able to find later. Between multiple people multiple channels a scrolling wall of system notices, it’s basically ephemeral and can’t be relied upon to find important things later in that mess. Did I tag you on that attachment here in this channel, that channel or did I send it to you directly as a DM a week ago, or was it not an attachment but a link to a file in a shared drive so I can’t filter it out of the attachments but have to search everything that is a link…

Organisations also develop their own email etiquette and culture… which can substantially affect how they will balance communication between email and chat.

Also … my personal experience from lots of ideation cycles at everything from improv, to weekend product development hackathons, and so many hours in business meetings. As valuable as an outside perspective can be for development of a new innovative take on something, not having any experience can lead to a lot of problems, from failing to understand the importance of certain technical features your potential customers won’t even mention because they take it for granted no one would even consider offering a service without it, to difficulty gathering feedback from potential and early beta customers because you’re playing catch up trying to learn enough to fully understand what they are telling you. I say this not to discourage you, just to highlight a possible large pothole in the road ahead of you.

+1 for "It’s for stuff people want to be able to find later." Chat deprecates fast, too informal to describe the problem to be recognizable two years from now, different companies and customers are on different channels and platforms...

But I can still find that email from 2014 about a specific problem.

I work as a professor at a university. Email, and in-person meetings, are the default methods of communication. Looking at my inbox now, messages include:

- Some discussion about an upcoming conference. It is being hosted by someone at another university and several of us are offering advice and support.

- Some discussion internal to my department about course planning

- Some FYI emails about upcoming committee assignments, a move to a new office, etc.

- A copy of some exams that I've been asked to grade within the next week or so

- Some personal stuff

and more. No messages from students now, but when the semester starts I will get those as well.

Email is the only communication system that's used by everyone here, by default. Communication, at least in my corner of the university, is asynchronous -- if you really need to get someone's attention now, then the building had better be on fire. As an exception, professors hold "office hours" where they are available to students for drop-in help on demand.

Chat like Teams, Zulip, etc. is also used, but it tends to be set up by small groups at their own initiative. For example I have a longstanding Zulip chat with two of my close colleagues.

> copy of some exams

How do you segregate emails for different exams? E.g., if you teach two courses and have to grade assignments in both, what’s your workflow? Is this a solved problem in some LMS that your org uses?

These were graduate comprehensive exams. These are an unusual case, as they are a rare occurrence, graded by more than one faculty member, and only a handful of them.

For ordinary classes, how I receive exams is up to me. For large classes I always administer and collect the exams in person and in hard copy. (Except as the Covid situation dictated.) For small classes I sometimes give take-home exams, and allow students to hand in a hard copy or email it to me. I've also set up folders via Dropbox or MS OneDrive (individually for each student) in the past.

We use Blackboard as our LMS. In principle this is a solved problem there, in practice I'd rather finagle a couple dozen emails than deal with Blackboard more than I have to.

I saw in your HN profile that you teach math. Is that why you prefer hard copy submissions? Must be hard to deal with sheaves of paper.

My wife is a assistant prof as well. I built her an e-mail bucketing system where her students email assignments to different email addresses (like assignment1@her-domain.com OR mid-term@her-domain.com) and it sits inside different buckets with the same name as the email address.

That’s why I was curious about how other profs handle this situation.

Edit_1: what’s the issue with Blackboard?

I do teach math. If the exams are given in class, then I don't have any choice but hard copy. Exams are free-response, where showing your work matters, and these are difficult to pigeonhole into any particular format.

As for Blackboard, I find it obtuse, slow, and painful to use. Anything you want to do requires multiple clicks, each of which takes a noticeable amount of time. Not that much, but after a lot of clicks my patience quickly runs thin.

It is also a very elaborate piece of software, which has a very particular idea of what a course should look like -- and this idea is based on conversations with senior administrators, not with faculty or students. It is after all the former who are making the purchasing decisions. You can read this famous Twitter thread on Blackboard and baby clothes:

https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776

I have no desire to adapt my course to anyone else's workflow, let alone to one I find obtuse.

That said, I am unusually stubborn in this regard, even by the standards of math departments. For example I still prefer to keep my schedule as a .txt file, rather than using Google Calendar/Outlook/etc., which pretty well marks me as a luddite. Not everyone hates BB.

> my impression of email is that it's very hard to use for communication because it's too formal, so it's hard for average people to communicate with

Once it goes external sure, but email is ubiquitous in most companies on Earth and ranges from highly formal to casual shitposting internally.

Many have tried to replace it unsuccessfully despite all it's setup, usability and security flaws, there's a reason for that.

For me: I love the balance between meaningful and impermanence, that I can delete the cruft and organise the important stuff to keep for later, you can filter everything into folders that hits your inbox with a few a clicks, that you can have multiple and shared inboxes for appropriate workgroups. When I worked at _bigcorp_ it was common for a new hire to ask a question and someone would respond in a minute forwarding an email from 7 years ago explaining how to fix the problem.

If you think that every email has to be a formal masterpiece that will be graded you are over thinking it. That type of work generally belongs in a document in G-Suite, confluence, git, etc. Notifications that it exists or needs review may go out via automated or manual email.

If you think that most conversations should be instant messages, you are likely being quite inconsiderate of other people’s time. Likewise, many will not read chat messages that meet some definition of old.

Email tends to have better filters, tagging, sorting, and search to allow the recipient to never miss what is important to the recipient using criteria chosen by the recipient. When I return from vacation I’m sure to read everything sent by my boss and those things related to my area of focus. The rest is likely to go unread unless I’m mentioned in the original or it is brought to my attention.

Collaboration through G-Suite and similar has thankfully ended most passing around of an attachment for review. A similar thing has happened by for code reviews with tools like GitHub and gerrit. Notifications via email from those tools is helpful.

If you are lucky enough to work somewhere that has a culture of plaintext email, in-line replies, proper trimming of cruft from replies, and thread friendly clients, email can be a joy to use. If you work somewhere with Exchange and Outlook, email feels more like a necessary evil.

> My impression of email is that it's very hard to use for communication because it's too formal.

Young people tend to overthink the formal aspect, I know I did. In practice business emails are really:

    Hey [Name],
    
    [Content of Slack message]
    
    Thanks,
    [Other Name]

This is true in internal emails and within close-knit partnerships between people of different companies, but not for more official B2B communication such as cold emails and C-level stuff.

Also, it’s still usually coupled with the Official Brand Signature.

"it's harder to write a single, well-read, overelaborate email with all the details, than it is to send instant messages back-and-forth asking and answering questions." While it might be harder for YOU, it is easier for the other person and takes up much less of their time. This is important for you to grasp. Your colleagues are not teachers, although you will be expected to learn from them. They are not paid primarily to answer your questions, unless they're internal support, they are paid to do their job. If you want to ask a question, ask the whole question, be precise, definitely don't start with "can I ask you a question? " and be prepared to wait for an answer. Don't expect them to drop everything and give you the answer now. Especially don't expect them to engage in a lengthy back and forth with you just because you can't be arsed to compose an email.

I fully agree. Sometimes the information I want to convey is a lot longer than the IM input field, and I'd rather dump it all in an email (which I can compose and add images to, and even edit parts of to clarify), rather than deliver the info 1 paragraph at a time.

If the other side has questions, sure they can chat, etc, but imagine if they have a question after the 1st paragraph, in chat they'd ask and interrupt my train of thought, in an email, chances are, that question will be answered a few paragraphs later anyway...

There are sometimes advantages of formality. The persistence of mails is better. I have never looked up something on Teams that is older than maybe a week.

Mails aren't perfectly suited for documentation either, but I restrict Teams to day-to-day conversations. It is extremely hard to extract sensible information out of a chat.

You could create a channel for every topic to keep things more tidy, but people would just spam their thoughts into the next random channel they find. So you would need moderators again...

My experience having worked in several different jobs across several sectors, both in the public and private sector: email is still used heavily internally and it is the default for most people.

The formality of email has decreased over the years, though there’s still that odd expectation of salutations when writing emails. However, email has been around for most office workers entire working careers, and people don’t give up old habits easily. As is often said, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

Another thing to note: many of the people I work with can’t even be reliably reached on something like teams. There’s no expectation that it must be monitored, but they are always reachable by email.

In my work, I ignore a lot of email, because the stuff that can be expected in an email range from actually-very-important-you-must-react (tm) to why-do-i-have-to-live-on-the-same-planet-than-you (r).

Example of the former:

Hey DusteD, this thing is happening that includes you

Example of the latter: Dear Full Name Because I'm a template

Other Full Name edited that page on the internal wiki that you don't care about but on which your name is mentioned for reasons beyond your control.

Best Regards, atlassian spambot

Things are not entirely better with slack though, because bots.. Something that solves the problem that some information is temporally sensitive and more relevant than other.. Hard problem. Personal opinions.

Email a lot of times is still the de facto standard when it comes to corporate communications, especially in large corporations. You might be able to get away with MS Teams when you have less than 300 people, but when you start to get into the thousands process and efficiency start to really matter. No one has time to keep up with call the chat happening in hundreds of channels (worse they are threaded half the time now and you have to manually expand them).

I would say don't over think it, I am a team lead and communicate with other organizations all the time, internal and external, 90% of the time the email is:

Mr. $lastname

whatever I want to write here about what I need or to answer a question.

$default_email_signature_already_here

A lot of time email is used for meetings to schedule in person or MS Teams meetings, exchanging files, relaying important information. Sure we have MS Teams/Slack/etc, but that is more for ad-hoc, quick communications.

You are a high schooler and you will have a lot of growth when it comes to how the business world works (I know I did).

Another thing with emails, they hold a certain legal sense. Ad-hoc communication and a message to a slack channel can be "lost" or "claimed to not be seen" it is very hard to claim you did not see an email that was sent directly to you. Also, email acts as a a system of records better than Slack/Teams/Etc ever will in my opinion.

Edit: Also this article was posted to HN recently and it captures another benefit of email being asynchronous vs synchronous. https://www.patkua.com/blog/email-is-async/

In my experience working for tech startups for the last 5 years that have had between 10-5000 people, your assumptions are correct. Emails are only used for external communications and for receiving Jira/Confluence/CI/GDocs/etc notifications. Nobody sends emails internally, all communication is over Slack.

Even a notice of resignation?

Yes. In my experience earlier this year, all HR, Accounts and Legal comms with the company was over Discord, except for some onboarding for new people at the beginning. No email was used at the end.

They had good departments with high quality staff and professional quality comms (considering it fit in Discord) in each of those too.

Emails were used for automated notifications though, such as GitHub, Expensify and BambooHR notices. But not the human messages.

Come to think of it, I'm not even sure how I would have found my colleagues email addresses to send them anyway. I didn't know my manager's email.

I take exception to the slack comments. It seems a tool that is very heavily used by developers and the tech industry, which of course is massive, but in Google Workplace, their chat does an adequate job for lots of inter company comms.

The most exciting thing I have seen in the last few weeks is getting emails related to comments in a google doc related to notes users post and either tag or ask questions. I love the ability right in the email to respond, in context, to what the users want to know.

I have to believe this will evolve and become more commonly used in email, which somewhat reminds me of the old Google Wave, of which i was a fan. They were onto something.

Properly focused, email is a very very powerful tool. Thanks for the post.

The asynchronous nature of email is useful. If I get a chat message in slack or teams, I generally assume a response is needed immediately. If I get a notification, I'll drop what I'm working on, and respond to their question.

With email, there's no expectation of that, at least not at my company. If you send an email, you expect a response sometime between the next few hours and the next few days. The only notification is a flag on my email client, which is easily ignored until I'm at a stopping point and can dedicate time to the question.

In one of my previous companies, email was used for sending source codes. Let's say I work with developer B, C, and D. And don't forget to CC other related, important persons, like team lead and manager. All of them have the record stored in inbox.

P.S: of course we didn't send the source code as is. We used GPG, so only relevent persons could decrypt it.

Encryption doesn’t address the reason sending source code over email is terrifying…

Email: the original distributed VCS

What are some other reasons?

In the companies I've worked for matters of significant importance are addressed with "@here" in Slack. E-mail is used to communicate with external vendors

What’s the email threading problem? Asking because gmail seems to do it pretty well by stacking emails with the same subject line together.