99% of the world doesn't work in HN land of high pay for high expectations. Most places are trying to force people to work 100hrs a week for as close to min wage as possible.
Unless countries start enacting actual labor laws with teeth I stand by my statement that no one really wants or needs email to work better, there already are alternatives.
Hard disagree. Email sucks in just about every way.
Get a few years on you and the Grind-set will fade as you realize you don't want the only thing in life to be work. You will be glad email still exists.
Messages sometimes take minutes or even go up a to come through for no apparent reason what so ever.
Massive spam issues. Headers are trivially forged
People can sign up other peoples addresses to mailing lists, and if that 3rd party is a company, good luck not getting re-subscribed to random stuff for the rest of eternity.
That's a feature. I don't want senders to know if their message was received without my explicit acknowledgement.
There is, but nobody uses it.
> Massive spam issues.
Verify your recipients, then add them to a white list, then block everybody else, like a typical chat program does.
Every major email client has supported read receipts for a very long time now. It's just rarely enabled by default outside of corporate environments (I would guess in part because users find it invasive).
The funny bit here is that email itself hasn't actually changed at all (at least not in ways that affect personal communication). It's just that folks have become used to the intrusive instant gratification of push-based chat systems.
For personal use cases email is great.
- Corporate support chats (no way to export/capture a papertrail as a customer, usually horribly brittle)
- Proprietary/company-specific messaging solutions in my account on various sites (no notification channel for responses, often no papertrail for me either)
- Contact forms (unidirectional, not standardized, no papertrail for me as a sender)
- Push notifications (single-device only, no reasonable inbox management, headline-only)
- SMS (just no on so many levels, most importantly that I don't want everything to be tied to my phone/phone plan and that I can't own my phone number in the same way that I can own a TLD)
The EU (or Germany, I still haven't found out) mandates companies to have a support email address, and it's just so much more pleasant than the US pattern of providing only phone support, a horrible support chat experience, or a mailing address.