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Comment by ejoso | Hacker News Reader

This makes my brain hurt. Few things I hate more than email. The single worst way to get in touch with me. As a user of it for more decades than I’d like to recall, I despise email.

Sure, the infinite archive is mildly helpful. But search-ability is marginal in any tool I’m aware of. The folders, filters and other management suggestions mentioned make it a second job. Email is a life tax we’re all forced to pay. It is a problem that is yet to be solved, though many have tried.

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I think the problem with emaill is more the availability of it. Anyone can send you an email so they mostly wind up as junk that needs to be managed.

One of the most significant problems, agreed.

Also, email is free to the sender but costly (in time) to the recipient. This is reflected in the quantity of messages, but also in their verbosity. People rarely expend the effort to edit or be concise. Both are costly to readers.

For anything that will benefit from back and forth, and isn't that important. I hate email too. I check it like only once a day at work, and my person email, i check even less.

I have it the other way around. I have all messenger notifications silenced except email. This way when people message me I only see their messages whenever I feel like checking if I got any messages. All importart stuff goes into my email, and I can see the push notification immediately.

If I did this, my notifications would never stop. I get tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of emails every day. Even heavily filtered, I can only afford to check work email a couple times a day. Most that make it past the filters are still ignored and immediately archived.

You mean from random people? Don't post your personal email publicly then. I have masked emails posted publicly and while I do get occasional spam, it's more like 2-3 emails a month.

A day? How on earth did you get in such a situation?

It really just depends on your email client. I use elm and my inbox, received and sent folders are stored in flat files, so i can just use vim or other linux tools to quickly search for any email from the past 25 years. In many chat apps you cant even search at all. I find email by far the most efficient method of communication.

Sadly the searchability on IM platforms is even worse than that of email. Discord (among others) often can't find the very text that's right in front of you.

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