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.
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.