I don’t remember the last time I actually emailed someone I knew as a form of communication. I forward newsletters to my wife sometimes. The culture of texting, where you can take your time to respond (within a day or two), has kind of made email obsolete.
Email is still really useful when you have a lot to say but don’t want to write a letter. If I’m catching up on the last several weeks with my parents, I’m not going to write a 10-page text. I can write a nicely formatted email and attach a few photos, though. It’s far more convenient than writing a letter and stuffing a bunch of printed photos into an envelope.
Exactly. The need/desire to write longer form like this may not come up as often with other more immediate means to communicate, but when it does, email’s there to serve its purpose.
That’s a good point. I guess if I’m in the situation where I have a lot to say; I’d rather just talk on the phone with someone. Now that I think of it, I feel like the telephone replaced physical letters before email even came along. But, I do highly respect the long-form communication of letters and email. It’s just kind of rare these days.
You don’t email for work reasons or for setting up appointments? My job doesn’t even involve email but I get emails from my boss from time to time and for me to make appointments with certain things I have to do it over email…
Oh I definitely email at work. I meant in my personal life. Like, I can’t remember the last time I emailed a friend or family member. But yeah I email at work, or for customer support, or to businesses and whatnot.
I remember when Whatsapp started taking off here in Europe. Everyone was like “you can text for free now, even send media, it all just works over the internet.” And I always said “well isn’t it just the same as email? Your smartphone can do that anyway, what do you need WA for?” and I still kinda feel like that.
The most popular method of communication mentioned in the scientific papers I’ve had to read (pretty small sample) is email, so it’s not fully obsolete
I really like email. Something about its free as in freedom nature/protocol fills me up with joy as I fire up my email clients! It’s just nice and warm compared to all the corpo bullshit messengers. Sadly, Google and Microsoft are trying their best to lock down email. But I believe it’s gonna outlast their shenanigans, hopefully. Meanwhile, I have my trusty local email clients to keep me company
Except its completely unencrypted
Use GPG.
Yeah, it’s not without faults, so ProtonMail and similar may be a good compromise, or encrypting and sending longer documents. Ideally one day email will be rebuilt from the ground up with encryption.
Also to address your later comments, E2EE messengers are great, but short form writing is simply a different use case from long form.
I mean, your connection to your email provider is encrypted (I hope!) - probably with TLS
Your email provider will communicate with the receivers email server over an encrypted connection (probably TLS again)
Your recipient connects to their provider over a secure connection too!
Yes, your email companies can read it, but that is the case with lots of IM providers too…
Why would u not use an e2e encrypted im service. Thats the bare minimum.
I feel you. I have a Gmail address for account logins, shopping, social media (Lemmy, Mastodon, LinkedIn). I have my own email domain and server for people I actually want to communicate with. Ever since I set it up a few months ago I’ve been enjoying email so much more again.
Do you have any tips on how to do that? Not even you writing stuff out but if you can post some links… I’m tempted to do that and leave gmail behind
The easiest way is with mail in a box. That’s what I used! You can message me if you’d like. I have a blog post with additional notes I’ll send you.
why people have moved from email to im is beyond me.
one gives up topical conversation threads with relevant aubject lines, easier search and retrieval, thread-specific groups and readers, more robust spam-filtration, the lack of necessity of a phone number, more flexible options for cross-platform access, downloadability of your messages, options to host your own server, and so on.
in return, you get perhaps a tad more convenience from an im – even that is debatable, though.
it’s high time we all returned to the friendly envelope instead of the intrusive chat bubble.
edit: another benefit: with email, you can still communicate with people who’ve chosen a different email platform. they don’t have to have the same domain as your email provider.
It’s simpler to type a quick a text without needing a subject line. Also internet messaging is usually more secure because even though email now usually uses TLS it stored on your email providers server without encryption. Using apps like Signal this is not the case (texting still is unencrypted or proprietary though).
email is the main way I want communications sent to me. I still get annoyed statements can’t be emailed over mailed. mailed is not more secure. just leave out most of the account number or better yet have a unique statement account number
I still use this that way. One is group of instructors for something like Scouts, we plan trips and stuff like that but also lan parties and going to pub. There are loads of people using different DM services but all of us have email.
And we have family wishlist email where we send what we want for Christmas and birthdays, anyone can look it up and buy/make something.
Somewhat true if you have anyone left who wants to talk to you by email.
First people stopped using it for socializing, and now it’s slowly on the way out for work communication too IME. Not secure enough. Better to use a secure messenger which requires login. And personally I quite like this, assuming the messenger is on the web and requires no software install.
The reality is that the main surviving use case for email is as a notification engine.
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