[HN Gopher] Benefits of choosing email over messaging
___________________________________________________________________
Benefits of choosing email over messaging
Author : iparaskev
Score : 148 points
Date : 2025-10-05 08:12 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.spinellis.gr)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.spinellis.gr)
| ejoso wrote:
| 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.
| James_K wrote:
| 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.
| ejoso wrote:
| 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.
| qwertytyyuu wrote:
| 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.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| 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.
| ejoso wrote:
| 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.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| 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.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| A day? How on earth did you get in such a situation?
| trinix912 wrote:
| 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.
| cpncrunch wrote:
| 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.
| gsliepen wrote:
| Nice. Note though that you don't necessarily have to limit
| everyone else to email; some messaging platforms allow one user
| to post something using a webpage for example, and cause that to
| send email to another user, and vice versa. One data point:
| GitHub's issue tracker can forward issues as email, and you can
| reply to those back via email, and your response will end up as a
| new comment on the issue.
| elliotto wrote:
| I've often thought about building a messaging platform aggregator
| that takes conversations from
| Whatsapp/messenger/discord/Instagram DMs/etc and provides a
| unified interface for them. I suspect there's a bunch of legal
| and annoying auth things that make this impossible. But at its
| core these things are just arrays of strings
| ejoso wrote:
| Many have tried and hit the very same obstacles you mention.
| Quite the quagmire.
| tazjin wrote:
| This used to be fairly common, back in the old days. Programs
| like Pidgin unified many messengers into a single app.
|
| For a while, many messengers actually shared underlying
| protocols (e.g. Google Talk & Facebook were both using XMPP at
| some point, and you could even cross-message).
|
| Nowadays this is much harder. There's some exceptions
| (Telegram) with open client protocols, but I wouldn't wanna try
| and implement something like Discord, it'll be a never-ending
| tarpit.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Discord is (or at least was) easy to "implement" because
| their bot and user API is mostly the same.
| dijit wrote:
| until they ban you under the ToS that says "no third party
| clients".
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28435490
| sethammons wrote:
| This was Pigeon Messenger, a quarter century ago
| jpc0 wrote:
| On the meta platforms I am intricately familiar with the
| Whatsapp API and it is literally not possible unless you are
| effectively going to effectively run WhatsApp Web in a browser
| instance and interact with it which is against ToS.
|
| Whatsapp API works on the basis of conversations, the
| conversation has to be initiated by another party and only
| exists for 24hours from the last message from the other party.
| Sending messages unprompted is not possible unless it's a
| templated message.
|
| I can believe this exists to counter spam, and let's not ignore
| the fact that WhatsApp messages through the API costs more per
| message than SMS.
| arccy wrote:
| it exists as client side programs, like https://meetfranz.com/
| abxyz wrote:
| https://www.beeper.com/
| vincvinc wrote:
| About half of the problems mentioned by the article are solved
| by the all-in-one-inbox beeper.com, now owned by Automattic.
|
| It allows me for example to avoid Instagram's crack app while
| still DMing with friends only available on there.
|
| Except "Long term availability" ... I'd love to have my full
| chat archive under my own control but doesn't seem on the
| roadmap.
| ntcho wrote:
| Has some quirks, but Beeper is exactly what you are describing:
| https://www.beeper.com/
| tcfhgj wrote:
| Beeper does this already: https://www.beeper.com/
| black3r wrote:
| What emails suck at is communication between multiple people in a
| work setting. That's why Slack, Teams, and others emerged and got
| popular.
|
| For example:
|
| - When multiple people respond to the same email, the email
| "thread" branches out into a tree. If the tree branches out
| multiple times, keeping track of all the replies gets messy.
|
| - While most clients can show you the thread/tree structure of an
| email chain, it only works if you've been on every email in the
| chain. If you get CC'd later, you'll just see a single email and
| navigating that is messy.
|
| - Also if you get CC'd later, you can't access any attachments
| from the chain.
|
| - You can link to a Slack/Teams conversation and as long as it's
| in a public channel, anyone with the link can get in on it (for
| example you have a conversation about a proposed feature which
| then turns into a task -> you describe the task simply and link
| "more info in this slack convo"), you can't do that with Emails
| (well I guess you could export a .eml file, but it has the same
| issue as getting CC'd later)
|
| - When a thread no longer interests you, you can mute it in
| Slack/Teams. You can't realistically do that with emails, as most
| people will just hit "reply all"
|
| - But also sometimes people will hit "reply" instead of "reply
| all" by a mistake and a message doesn't get delivered to everyone
| in the thread.
| wisidisi wrote:
| I oppose. Mails are superior in announcing to multiple people.
| If people want to participate they can in many ways. It is well
| structured, well documented and offers coherent discourse.
| Slack/Teams are for just-in-time dynamic, collaborative
| conversation that are quickly fading and missing out on all the
| strengths mails have in terms of permanence, archival, search
| and general quality. Something that totally gets lost in
| instant messaging like Discord, Teams and such where context is
| basically non-existant and may be gone completely in minutes.
|
| Remember Google+ ? What lasted was Gmail and barebone simple
| Mail.
| portaouflop wrote:
| Google+ dies not because it was a bad product but because
| google changed strategy and killed it.
|
| Ultimately it's all subjective - some people prefer email
| some chat some calls some no comms at all.
|
| If you can communicate well, articulate what you say and want
| well, and actually read and understand what I write then I
| will communicate over any medium with you. If not then I'll
| have a bad time regardless of medium
| NBJack wrote:
| This assumes said email is properly filtered and doesn't get
| lost in a sea of work spam. I also assert email is actually
| terrible at context; unless that is part of an existing
| thread, or again your filtering/sorting is great, you will
| often spend at least a paragraph just establishing context.
|
| > It is well structured, well documented and offers coherent
| discourse.
|
| You must have great coworkers who know how to communicate. I
| cannot say the same for everyone at my company. Email at many
| of the places I've worked can quickly devolve on more than
| 3-5 replies.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Worse than the work email spam at some of my previous jobs
| was the Slack spam - at least the email spam was work-
| related. Too many people substitute work for a social life
| and treat Slack like they're on a group chat with friends.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with social chat on Slack. It just
| needs to be either in a thread or, better yet, in a
| dedicated social channel.
|
| Saying people shouldn't have social chat on Slack is like
| people shouldn't have social chat in the office kitchen
| because it's part of the same office complex.
| nkrisc wrote:
| And if they did that, I'd have nothing to complain about.
| That's never been my experience though with Slack at
| work.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| That's unfortunate but it's not a universal trend.
|
| The problem here isn't Slack, it's poor Slack etiquette.
| However you can change etiquette at a company level.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > Worse than the work email spam at some of my previous
| jobs was the Slack spam
|
| It's annoying if not muted and you need to work. Why not
| do that?
|
| A workplace with no chat and zero talk would be pretty
| grim.
| bonaldi wrote:
| > Mails are superior in announcing to multiple people
|
| People who are known _at time of sending_. A slack message
| can be searched by those joining the team much (much) later,
| those who move teams, in-house search bots, etc. Mailing
| lists bridge this gap to some extent, but then you 're really
| not just using email, you're using some kind of external
| collaboration service. Which undermines the point of "just
| email".
| layer8 wrote:
| MS Exchange had sort-of solved that problem with Public
| Folders. Basically shared email folders across an
| organization.
|
| The older solution is NNTP/Usenet. I wish we had a modern
| system like that.
| PretzelFisch wrote:
| you just use a shared inbox for the team
| cycomanic wrote:
| > > Mails are superior in announcing to multiple people > >
| People who are known _at time of sending_. A slack message
| can be searched by those joining the team much (much)
| later, those who move teams, in-house search bots, etc.
|
| People use slack search successfully? It's search has to be
| one of the worst search implementations I have come across.
| Unless you know the exact wording in the slack message, it
| is almost always easier to scroll back and find the
| relevant conversation just from memory. And that says
| something because the slack engineers in their infinite
| wisdom (incompetence) decided that messages don't get
| stored on the client, but get reloaded from the server
| (wt*!!), so scrolling back to a conversation that happened
| some days ago becomes an excercise of repeated scroll and
| wait. Slack is good for instant messaging type
| conversations (and even for those it quickly becomes
| annoying because their threads are so crappy), not much
| else. I wish we would use something else.
| keiferski wrote:
| I've always thought email needs a new "view mode" that somehow
| imports the email structure without actually using a separate
| program like Slack. Something like an expanded workflow view
| that shows emails as a series of separate nodes flowing in one
| direction.
|
| The key point being that this is not a separate program, but a
| different way to view the data already inside emails.
|
| I'm just brainstorming here so apologies if this doesn't make
| much sense.
| James_K wrote:
| The tree format seems an advantage, if anything. It naturally
| separates discussions into separate threats. Messaging software
| would dump all these into a single channel so you could have
| different conversations happening at the same time
| interspersed.
| mrbadguy wrote:
| Agreed, a single thread is painful if it's actually spawning
| off multiple sub-topics. I suppose the better answer is to
| start a separate thread in Slack in that case but it can flow
| weirdly where the topic originally arises in one place but is
| continued elsewhere; it relies on someone linking on the
| original thread to keep context. In a mailing tree, that
| context is still there.
|
| All of this depends on having a sane email client though,
| doing it via outlook or gmail is a nightmare and I suspect
| this is the root of many people's aversion to email.
| noosphr wrote:
| Mailing lists. They've been around since the 80s. They solve
| all these problems. They are amazing. Use them.
| portaouflop wrote:
| I disagree. I might have been born a generation too late but
| I think mailing lists are terrible, horrible way to
| communicate.
|
| My favourite is text forums - I guess shows when I was
| socialised online
| em-bee wrote:
| text forums are just a web interface for mailinglists, or
| vice versa. google groups and others can (or could) support
| both, and usenet news too. they are all just messages. the
| difference is only the tool you use to display them.
| OCTAGRAM wrote:
| There was GMANE to convert mailing list into NNTP archive. I
| was big fan of it. Too bad it's gone
| general1465 wrote:
| So maybe having some hybrid like Slack/Teams over email? Where
| UI of such email client is rendering emails as a room/channel
| and subject is the name of the room (removes RE, FW, ...) and
| works like room identification?. So you will get IRC like
| experience. If you will add PGP on top of it, it can be also
| secure and decentralized.
| AJ007 wrote:
| Delta Chat certainly could emerge in that direction.
| https://delta.chat/
| lostlogin wrote:
| The 'reactions to emails' thing that Outlook does is gross.
| However I avoid most chat apps and dislike email so I'm
| probably not a representative user.
| dogleash wrote:
| All those problems with email sound like a treat compared to
| screenshots of chats I'm not in.
| kitd wrote:
| I find a structured conversation _far_ easier to work with
| personally.
|
| You can respond only to the subthread you want to, and not have
| the single thread become a mess of quoted and irrelevant
| replies that you have to scroll past to find the answer you
| want.
|
| Additionally, shared folders fit well within a team environment
| and works much like usenet for messaging.
| prokopton wrote:
| Hey lets you mute a thread.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I do agree that email quickly becomes messy, even with mailing
| lists. It's really much the same issue Slack has, a lack of
| training. It's just assumed that people will know how to use
| both email and Slack, but we don't. For email it's a decade old
| debate, that rational minds lost as Outlook dictated top-reply,
| forcing you to read threads backwards and discouraging the
| recipient from inline replies and cutting out irrelevant parts.
|
| Slack is equally terrible, because the interface and threads is
| actually hard to navigate and I honestly cannot make search
| work in a rational manor. The more discusions you have in
| Slack, the worse it becomes.
| skydhash wrote:
| Slack is the equivalent of shouting across the room. I copied
| anything that seems important to my notes. Any message that's
| more than an handful of screen old can be considered lost.
| maccard wrote:
| IMO, that's a benefit of slack. At $LAST_JOB, we had a 30
| day expiry on data in slack, which everyone was in uproar
| over initially. But, it forced us to actually put stuff
| elsewhere.
| sethammons wrote:
| Work said "email is not official, use slack." We literally had
| a meeting where people were complaining about not knowing about
| recent changes. "We announced it in these 5 channels, we will
| start announcing it in more."
|
| Like, email works for announcements yo. Naw, let's jeep
| messaging N other places.
| ctkhn wrote:
| Isn't there one company wide channel? With slack or email,
| you still need to make a list of people who get the
| announcement. Slack has been a lot better in my experience
| for joining a team and looking back at the history
| stared wrote:
| Sure, emails are not the right tool for multiple people
| discussing a project, even less - when we want to add new
| members to a thread, or to leave (by those who were added, but
| for whom it is not longer relevant).
|
| At the same time, when I was a cofounder & CTO, I used
| Basecamp, which promoted email-like threads. (There is a chat-
| like functionality as well, but I made policed to use it only
| for impromptu things like setting Zoom meetings or so, nor for
| anything that may be important in the future (brainstorming,
| ideas, architecture choices, analyzis, etc).
|
| It created a culture of clarity of thoughts I never had before,
| or after. And yes, they a year later is was easy to search for
| why we picked this way of optimizing quantum computing in Rust
| not another (which pros and cons, possible paths not yet
| explored, etc), go back to unused UI designs, retrieve research
| for publication, etc.
| finaard wrote:
| The two big problems are shitty mail clients, and people not
| knowing how to quote (which gets enabled by the shitty mail
| clients).
|
| If someone gets CC'd later than typically because the
| discussion got to a point where the input is needed for the
| current question - and in a mail thread with proper quoting
| surprisingly often the quoted email is sufficient context for
| the added guy to jump in.
|
| What makes a big mess out of things is the nested list of fully
| quoted emails with top answers at the bottom I now have to go
| through when getting added to figure out what the fuck they
| want from me.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| At least at my workplace, chats got popular because it was a
| way for humans to talk to humans without getting drowned out by
| dozens of automated messages, irrelevant announcements, and
| other clutter.
| cwmoore wrote:
| Found only "emerge" while searching these comments for the
| exact term "merge".
|
| The bifurcations of communications is unmanageable.
|
| Why is my own timeline is still manual, while presumably all
| the datacenters can combine, search and sort (merge) dated
| datapoints?
|
| I want a Personal Palantir or something, and no, not vibe coded
| in a weekend.
| ljlolel wrote:
| A bit off topic but deltachat is an amazing secure messenger over
| smtp
|
| https://delta.chat/pt/
| haunter wrote:
| This is what I wanted to post as well! Best of both worlds
| em-bee wrote:
| non localized link: https://delta.chat/
| layer8 wrote:
| The strengths of email is exactly that is isn't chat.
| Implementing chat over email isn't the solution.
| crummy wrote:
| At my current job (1000+ employee tech company), I pretty much
| never receive emails from humans. Plenty of automated
| notifications and the odd marketing mail, but everything else is
| Slack and Zoom.
|
| I think it's way better. Email has so many limitations,
| especially as soon as you're in a group discussion.
| jasode wrote:
| _> My colleagues and friends know that I prefer to communicate
| with them via email rather than chat messaging. _
|
| For some co-workers and especially for friends & family, the chat
| UI is much more ergonomic than email. Email usage has extra
| friction:
|
| - compose new email UI has extra SUBJECT: field you have to fill
| with junk (like _" hey"_ or _" question..."_) or skip over
|
| - email client UI for multiple messages from the same person in a
| listview repeats the same metadata headers which is visually
| redundant pollution. UI settings such as "organize by thread" or
| "organize by conversation" help but don't fully solve it.
|
| With chat apps, the back & forth conversation is visually cleaner
| without all the metadata clutter.
| dijit wrote:
| But that "subject" header makes it paletable.
|
| I would argue if you really can't come up with a subject then
| you probably shouldn't be asking at all.
|
| I got used to Zulip at my previous job and people made the same
| argument about "Topics" (which are basically subjects); but
| they forget that the messages are _read_ more often than they
| are written. A little friction in writing for an easier time
| reading and skimming is absolutely worth it.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| > But that "subject" header makes it paletable.
|
| That's true for some forms of communication, but for social
| chitchat in an ongoing conversation there isn't much
| relevance.
|
| Subject becomes especially ridiculous when Mail clients are
| localized and you get some "Re: AW: RE: Re: AW: fun stuff" as
| subject.
|
| At work subject tis key. Allows me to ignore 90% of the mails
| immediately.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I had a colleague that would come back from vacation, see 1000+
| emails, and just mark all unread emails and hit delete. And say
| _" If it's any important, they'll just mail me again"_.
|
| Not saying that it's a good way to do things, absolutely not, but
| it did open my eyes to the fact that some people will just
| indiscriminately delete emails, no mater how important they could
| be.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, odds are none of them is important. And they are probably
| right in that if it's important, the sender will look for them
| again.
|
| This person just got 1000 emails in the time of a vacation. How
| viably is it not to completely ignore that? It's even
| surprising that they bothered to look and cleaned up in a way
| that implies they aren't ignoring them on the daily work.
| j1elo wrote:
| That sounds like basically right (I agree with it all, I'm too
| the kind of person that enjoys all those advantages of email). So
| here I'm thinking from putting myself in the skin of the others:
|
| All this seems so much "me, me, me, me". People sending you a
| quick Whatsapp to let you know "tomorrow in Town sq. at 12h"
| don't want to have to use a clunky interface (sadly email apps
| are not up to par with instant messaging apps, not even close);
| they don't care either about your desire to have a unified inbox,
| and a long term archive. Agreed if it's for "important" things,
| but mostly instant messaging replaced email for day to day things
| that in an analog world would have been just said by landline
| phone.
|
| Relatedly, having a long term archival might come as a bit
| creepy, even. In apps this happens too, but at least I can say
| something extremely controversial and delete it for both people a
| couple minutes later. Or send a "view once" mesage.
|
| Regarding confidentiality, coincidentally not even 2 weeks ago a
| friend was telling me about a case of hos company sending an
| invoice, and being man-in-the-middle'd so the attacker just
| changed the bank account number and the customer thus paid to the
| wrong account. Nobody uses GPG, sadly. So at this point, for very
| important stuff I'd consider Whatsapp less confidential but more
| secure than email, ironically.
|
| Back to being me; I see a problem of usabilily. Even I admit that
| sending a whatsapp is much more convenient and practical than
| opening up K-9 Mail to _compose_ an email. You don't _compose_ a
| IM, you just hit a contact, jot it down, hit send, and there's
| extra social convention tools such as a blue tick indicating that
| maybe you can even stay put there because probably the other
| person may reply immediately.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| > Relatedly, having a long term archival might come as a bit
| creepy, even. In apps this happens too, but at least I can say
| something extremely controversial and delete it for both people
| a couple minutes later. Or send a "view once" mesage.
|
| I agree but in practice Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp etc are
| quite long term already. I can easily look up my chats from 15+
| years ago on Fb.
|
| But there is indeed a cultural unease, and it relates to the
| other top h post about social cooling. As you said, people want
| an online equivalent of phone calls and in person discussion.
| It's creepy and in some places even illegal to record phone
| calls or live conversations.
|
| On the other hand, written letters used to be private but meant
| for archival. Many people inherit a big box of neatly organized
| letters received from friends and family when grandma etc die.
|
| Email is a bit more letter-like in this.
|
| But these norms are in flux and especially for different
| generations the intuition can be different.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| > Regarding confidentiality, coincidentally not even 2 weeks
| ago a friend was telling me about a case of hos company sending
| an invoice, and being man-in-the-middle'd so the attacker just
| changed the bank account number and the customer thus paid to
| the wrong account.
|
| That sounds like a quite sophisticated attack. By far most Mail
| these days should be transport encrypted. The attacker thus
| must have control (legal or illegal, at least to fake a wrong
| MX DNS record) over either side and then manipulate the invoice
| and then need a bank account which can receive the payment,
| while hiding their traces. Seems quite sophisticated and
| targeted as an attack.
|
| > Nobody uses GPG, sadly.
|
| User experience there was never good. Signal/WhatsApp probably
| are the most userfiendly e2ee systems around: automatic key
| exchange with ability to verify. (While proprietary clients
| require trusting those, which is a big ask especially with
| Whatsapp/meta)
| j1elo wrote:
| I have no idea of how that went; now you have picked my
| interest and I'll be asking him to follow up. It did not
| occur to me that it needs to be too sophisticated of an
| attack (didn't stop to think through it too much,
| admittedly). Just thinking of how we collectively mostly
| never encrypt email seemed like the most obvious way to
| understand how that was possible. The email provider of
| either the company or the customer must have been
| compromised. But the bank account?
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Not knowing any details my first assumption would be that
| somebody mistyped a number, either in the template or while
| preparing the transfer and being hacked is just an excuse.
|
| Alternative is some generic phishing with a complete fake
| invoice, which somebody assumed to be true.
|
| Now if it is serious and an invoice was changed
| (independently from transport considerations) that alone is
| quite some effort: the original message has to be held back
| and analyzed, then it has to be manipulated (replaced) and
| then the message has to be sent on.
|
| If you get to that level of sophistication it's a lot more
| likely the source was hacked.
|
| There are a few other scenarios, like invoice being sent
| wrongly and some random person manipulating it before
| sending on, but if you aren't prepared by having a bank
| account for that purpose it's quite a risky thing to do. My
| private account can be traced to me ...
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > sadly email apps are not up to par with instant messaging
| apps, not even close
|
| E-mails have exactly the same properties as any instant
| messaging. Receive notifications, ability to answer instantly
| from a pop-up. What exactly are you missing? Or have you
| deliberately made email clunky on your own devices?
| bborud wrote:
| I have come to hate email so much there are weeks where I will
| check my email perhaps just once or twice in a week. Every 2-3
| months I _try_ to clean up my inbox by going through it and
| unsubscribing to all the rubbish I am opted into without my say-
| so. But since we use Gmail, this is a really, really, really slow
| process. Gmail is a terrible product that has no evolved
| meaningfully over the 20 or so years it has existed. And it doesn
| 't get any better when idiot product managers feel it is more
| important to add more AI nonsense than try to fix a product that
| is very poor at doing the thing it is supposed to do.
|
| (If anyone knows of a tool that helps me rapidly clean up my
| gmail, please let me know).
|
| But the worst thing about email is that nobody knows how to write
| emails anymore. Everyone just quotes the while thing and adds
| their comments on top. People no longer trim down the email and
| intersperse their comments throughout the response. Mail reading
| software no longer aids you in doing this - cleaning up the
| quoting for you (not that many mail readers did this before).
|
| And when you don't want to quote the email you are responding to,
| people include the whole mess anyway and just pop their response
| at the top. Rather than understanding that a threaded mail reader
| (as most mail readers are today) will provide the reader with the
| context they need just fine. There's no need to repeat dozens of
| older responses.
|
| I miss email from 25-30 years ago. When 90% of what landed in my
| inbox was actually for me, written by other human beings. Most of
| which knew how to produce a response to an email without it just
| being a sloppy mess.
|
| I wish people who wrote mail clients were more intelligent
| product designers and more thoughtful people. That they would
| understand that catering to people's poor habits was, and is, a
| bad idea and that a better idea would have been to make proper
| email quoting at least _a path of considerably less resistance_.
| komali2 wrote:
| Huh I never thought about the quoting thing. I'm definitely
| gonna clear out the auto quoted bits in my replies from now
| one.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Dissecting their email and interspersing your response,
| especially if expressing some disagreement, can come across
| as passive aggressive nitpicking, instead of taking in the
| whole message and charitable interpreting the entire intended
| message.
|
| Not saying that it is meant that way, but I know many take it
| that way.
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| if i write specific questions and people reply in totality
| i find that offensive and manipulative
|
| (adding another point of view)
|
| ultimately no way not to offend people who are dying to be
| offended
| bonoboTP wrote:
| I agree, this is context dependent. If the email clearly
| touches upon multiple topics and is separated into
| several questions, it can be better to answer point by
| point. Still, to me, ripping my message apart and
| inserting the comments feels a bit off, as if you were my
| prof or teacher grading and commenting and critiquing my
| paper.
|
| Of course, answering inplace makes it harder to weasel
| out of answering some of the points. In that sense it's
| more honest and straightforward to write it inbetween.
|
| > ultimately no way not to offend people who are dying to
| be offended
|
| This is absolutely true. One should not assume too much
| based on small things like this, assume good intentions
| until clearly proven otherwise instead of reacting to
| minor "clues" and "signs". But on the other hand when
| producing text, it's also good to know how they are
| culturally interpreted around you. You can say all that
| is a "you problem" but I don't think that thinking leads
| to a good life.
| Theodores wrote:
| > nobody knows how to write emails anymore
|
| I think the problem is bigger than that, nobody knows how to
| write anymore. In the past, people wrote in handwriting
| ('cursive' in America) on plain paper (with no guide lines) and
| with a fountain pen. We didn't keep what they put in the bin,
| so there is some survivor bias, however, when I look at letters
| my ancestors wrote, I am amazed at how few corrections there
| are.
|
| As I understand it, we have two thinking modes, there is the
| quick thinking by reaction and then there is the more
| convoluted 'slow' thinking where we use logic and reason. I am
| not convinced that too many of us have the skill of putting
| 'slow thinking' into written words, or the desire to put
| complicated ideas to paper.
|
| So, what changed?
|
| SMS and Twitter did have a text limit of 140 characters. This
| was not good if you need 140 characters just to introduce what
| you have to say, however, it didn't take long for people to
| adjust. Spelling was no longer important, neither was
| punctuation or sentence structure.
|
| Soon this 'communication with grunts' replaced eloquence, and
| we degraded our collective literacy. Nowadays you can't write
| beautiful emails to people as it is a bit of an imposition, you
| have spent maybe hours crafting words, they only have seconds
| to respond due to the all-pervasive 'busy lives' excuse, and
| they definitely don't have the ten minutes it takes to read
| your carefully written words. Hence, writing in full just means
| you get ghosted at best.
|
| Clearly there are more books being written than ever. School
| assignments also get done, same with work-related documents.
| However, the craft of writing has become even more
| professionalised, even though everyone can open some type of
| word processor, pick up a dictionary and write something
| awesome without having to get the old fountain pen out.
|
| As for the post, what if I was the son of the author, and I had
| to tidy up his affairs after some tragic accident? All of those
| emails would be gone, lost to posterity and only the emails
| from the bank read (because money). All of that obsession on
| having every email organised for the last four decades would be
| for nothing, outside of the mind of the author.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Most people used to be illiterate a few generations ago and
| then only had a handful of books in the house, like the Bible
| and some other staples, and their letters were full of
| spelling mistakes, and clumsy writing and bad letter shapes.
| This is also seen in reddit translation requests of postcards
| and letters.
|
| Your impression is based on immense selection bias. Maybe
| your ancestors were in the top percentiles, nobles,
| aristocrats, or even just doctors, academics and priests. But
| up until the early 20th century the vast majority were
| farmers and then they were factory workers.
|
| Great writing and abundant reading was always very niche.
| abxyz wrote:
| There are various tools to mass unsubscribe. Gmail also
| recently added the option to surface your subscriptions and
| unsubscribe. Gmail added the various email categories too.
|
| You can get back to the world you dream of. Every email I
| receive into my inbox is an email I want to receive :)
|
| You might also like superhuman.com and similar.
| jhogervorst wrote:
| > (If anyone knows of a tool that helps me rapidly clean up my
| gmail, please let me know).
|
| I've used Leave Me Alone (leavemealone.com) for cleaning up my
| subscriptions. It scans your past messages for subscriptions,
| sorts them by most frequent messages, and allows to unsubscribe
| (and delete) with one click. It's a nice tool for this purpose.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| It's quite rare I communicate via email anymore, (outside of work
| where it is still the main medium). I like the (relatively)
| open/decentralised nature of it, but I can't deny that chat apps
| like WhatsApp have a good UX for casual group discussions. Not to
| mention that all of my friends use WhatsApp, so I would struggle
| to use email as my primary communication method even if I wanted
| to.
|
| It means I kind of wonder what my personal email is for, other
| than a means to sign up to third party websites. There have been
| a few threads about RSS lately and it seems a lot of HNers hate
| email newsletters. I don't have a problem with them and if I'm
| receiving content on a fixed schedule, like once a week or even
| once a day, I think it's a good medium. I even get my RSS feed
| updates by email.
|
| Other than that, the top of my personal inbox right now is mostly
| marketing emails, notifications (like "we have changed our T&Cs",
| "you have a new message on LinkedIn" etc) and "what's on" emails
| from local theatres, cinema, etc (which of course is also
| marketing, but it's marketing I've specifically asked to
| receive).
| SvenL wrote:
| Something messengers made easy is photo/video sharing. This might
| be also a little bit tricky with email.
|
| Also most messages I write would be just the subject line ("on my
| way home"). Bigger topics I would rather have a call than writing
| them.
|
| But generally the points made in the post are valid and it's nice
| to see that it is working for the author.
| zahirbmirza wrote:
| Whatapp and other chatapps are popular because they are instant
| and have overcome the initial adaption issues that arrise with
| new messaging platforms. The interface of email its backend is
| too dated for instant chat messaging. Why were the MSN and yahoo
| messenger apps so popular in the early days of the internet? They
| were an evolution of written communication methods.
| Unfortunately, email is just a legacy product that no one wants
| to improve. So we all have to end up working around its
| limitations.
|
| As much as I want to create a non-meta alternative to Whatsapp or
| a better email infrastructure, there is no compelling enough
| differentiator for most users. Just look at the privacy benefits
| of Signal, yet, people don't care. Just look at the aesthetic
| benefits of iMessage, yet people don't care. They just want an
| easy to use and responsive cross platform method of
| communication.
|
| A good solution is a unified messaging app, able to combine all
| platform's messaging, but these often become defunct because of
| API issues or T&C breeched.
| tkgally wrote:
| The main reason I prefer email over messaging is that it allows
| me to correspond with the widest range of people. I work in
| academia and publishing and have various personal interests, and
| I want to be able to interact with people in many countries and
| walks of life. There is no single messaging service that would
| make that possible.
|
| Also, I want people to be able to contact me unsolicited. Many
| interesting jobs and opportunities have come my way over the
| years because someone I didn't know reached out to me by email.
|
| I do wish that email was standardized with better formatting
| conventions, though.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| > There is no single messaging service that would make that
| possible.
|
| messaging protocols can make it possible
| aftergibson wrote:
| I think this is more an argument for protocols over products. I
| wish XMPP had remained as popular as it has. The standard has now
| only slowly evolved, but it probably could have continued to meet
| the needs of our society as a compliment to email.
| johtso wrote:
| I've been having a bad time with email of late. It's been the
| method of communication between us and another company (a pretty
| creaky old product). I thought they were replying strangely and
| ignoring my questions "did they even read what I said!?". It
| turns out for whatever reason they hadn't been getting some of my
| emails.
|
| Now I can't trust that anything has been received unless I get an
| acknowledgement, so I have to keep pestering for replies.
| Basically lost trust in the protocol because it's dependent on
| the the other person's mailserver behaving they way you expect it
| to.
| skydhash wrote:
| > Basically lost trust in the protocol because it's dependent
| on the the other person's mailserver behaving they way you
| expect it to.
|
| That's the case of any protocol, digital or not. Email is
| pretty simple. Simpler than the current web, at least.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| > That's the case of any protocol
|
| Well, E-Mail is inherently async and allows a sequence of
| relays with no back channel to confirm delivery.
|
| With other protocols (except snail mail) I get a confirmation
| that recipient was valid and the message for delivered. With
| some I even get a marker it was read.
|
| With e-mail, with luck, I get a cryptic not standardized
| response mail, if something went wrong. Sometimes even only a
| lot later as delivery is retried for a few days in some
| cases.
| this_user wrote:
| The core technologies may be simple, but email really is an
| entire stack of protocols, mechanisms, and conventions. And
| therein lies the problem. It's not one well designed solution
| but one workaround layered on top of each other to make it
| work reasonably well.
| OCTAGRAM wrote:
| Mbox is not that easy to process, especially if 1986 time span is
| taken into account. There is base64 encoding. There is "="
| encoding, don't recall whats its name. "Equals" encoding. There
| are several character encodings if 1986 time span is taken into
| account, and each character encoding will be encrypted by equals
| signs. There was KOI8-R. KOI8-R was on BSD and Linux servers, but
| desktops had cp1251, so 1251 entered e-mail eventually, via
| e-mail clients autoconfigured to desktop encoding, or via webmail
| interfaces autoconfigured to web encoding which could likely be
| cp1251 and not likely koi8-r. Then utf-8 came in.
| TheChaplain wrote:
| Being in the IT business for a few decades, email is superior to
| anything else for record keeping. Especially with Thunderbird I
| find it almost too easy to find information I need, and addendums
| neatly threaded.
|
| And, it is quite difficult for the other part to hide/delete
| stupidness they send, which thankfully saved my behind twice.
|
| Chats are good for now-communication, but energy- and time
| consuming when you need to look up something that happened months
| ago.
| mitchell209 wrote:
| I can't even look up chats on my work PC older than a couple
| days ago because it's automatically deleted. Emails last for at
| least a few years.
| zachrip wrote:
| Gmail is dogsh*t at search. It's so bad. I can search the EXACT
| word I want and not a single email will come up, or it will
| bring up the most irrelevant emails.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| Same experience and it's so bad I sometimes question my
| sanity. At least I have a notmuch index setup on a server I
| can fall back on but it's just so bizarre a "search" company
| can't produce an app which can search properly emails!
| zachrip wrote:
| The worst part is that I pay for the privilege!
| zby wrote:
| It is quite frustrating that we have these discussions over and
| over again. Asynchronous communication is great - but it is not
| better than synchronous communication in some universal way. It
| depends. Personally I am very sensitive to interruptions - so I
| lean towards asynchronous. But when you are doing something and
| you really need to get some information from someone to proceed -
| then getting his response immediately means that your work is not
| interrupted. The other person is - but it is a trade off. In a
| team you have to make these trade-offs. It can be hard - because
| it takes from one side and gives to the other - people would like
| to be able to interrupt others and not be interrupted themselves.
| And it is even more complicated by the fact that some jobs and
| some people are more sensitive to interruptions and others are
| less - so it is hard to make fair rules about it. But it is a
| real trade-off to be made.
|
| UPDATE: Or take interactivity - a conversation is really powerful
| way of communicating. How a computer geek could even claim that
| asynchronous communication is always better - is he still using
| batch processors to run his jobs typing everything upfront and
| they waiting for the full run before he can fix his syntax
| errors?
| nottorp wrote:
| Umm both email and instant messaging are as asynchronous or
| synchronous as you want to make them...
| n4r9 wrote:
| For some reason, IM encourages people to send superficial
| quickfire messages, which is very inefficient if one party is
| busy.
|
| The classic example is
|
| Colleague: "Hi".
|
| _One hour passes_
|
| You: "Hey - what's up, can I help you with something?"
|
| _10 minutes pass_
|
| Colleague: "Yeah I was wondering if I could ask you about
| Foo"
|
| _One hour passes_
|
| You: "Sure, what do you need to know?"
|
| _Next day_
|
| Colleague: "I'm trying to export but it's not working."
|
| _One hour passes_
|
| You: "Okay... Is it giving you any error messages? Please
| give me as much info as you can in one go!"
|
| etc...
| vel0city wrote:
| I've pressed people who chat this way with me to change,
| and usually it seems people get it once they get shown how
| unproductive this kind of conversation is.
|
| Just ask me your question. Feel free to start with
| pleasantries if that's your style, but get to your point or
| the ask on the first message.
|
| https://nohello.net/en/
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| Interesting. I write messages in Teams about the same way I
| write emails. Some people prefer splitting each sentence in
| a separate message, some keep the whole body as one.
|
| Email just nudges to send whole body at once because it
| usually doesn't have a synchronous chat UI.
| stared wrote:
| This.
|
| Also, even if responses are just 20 second after each,
| there is this constant context switching, which takes more
| time and attention that if we took literally any other
| method (in person, email or call).
| lostlogin wrote:
| There is the opposite too, which is just as bad. The
| stream of consciousness messaging.
|
| 'Hi' 'I'm' 'Trying to get the' 'File' 'But' 'I' 'Need'
|
| Etc etc and it's 20 messages before you have any idea
| what's going on. The deluge of notifications is
| distraction.
| AuthAuth wrote:
| This type of communication style would be a problem on any
| communication medium. The problem needs to be fixed at the
| user level.
| GlibMonkeyDeath wrote:
| Email still has its use cases in the modern workplace. Sometimes
| you need a slower, more detailed communication channel,
| especially when inter-company communications are involved.
|
| But most of the things the OP likes about email make it a
| nightmare from a legal perspective. Once a company gets sued over
| labor/trade secret/IP related things, one result is a strict
| email (and other electronic communication) retention policy. Some
| retention periods can be as short as 6 months. Apps are deployed
| that scour your local storage to make sure you aren't archiving
| emails off-line. This removes many (most) of the archival
| advantages of email.
|
| Emails are often front-line evidence in lawsuits. A good example:
| https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-google-recruitment-ema...
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _most of the things the OP likes about email make it a
| nightmare from a legal perspective_
|
| Former litigator here: The late Dr. Randy Pausch mentioned this
| in his Last Lecture; IIRC, he urged people to keep all their
| emails. [0] That can be a really good idea -- keeping emails:
|
| * will help your lawyer reconstruct a timeline of events, build
| a narrative to tell the jury that's supported by the
| documentary evidence, and avoid spinning a tale that's
| undermined by emails that you didn't keep but someone else did;
|
| * will help make sure your people don't have private stashes of
| emails that have been deleted from your server but that
| resurface in response to subpoenas -- or search warrants.
|
| * will help corroborate the stories told by your witnesses:
| Judges and jurors tend to be skeptical of hindsight testimony
| because of faulty memory and the temptation to shade the truth
| or even lie -- recall how the House's January 6 committee
| hearings made such extensive use of emails, and also texts. If
| you didn't keep copies of emails, you won't have that evidence
| available;
|
| * will refresh your witnesses' memories so they don't testify
| incorrectly about something (whether in deposition or at trial)
| and have to correct their testimony -- which hurts their
| credibility.
|
| Moreover: Your opponent's lawyer will likely send you a
| "litigation hold" letter, meaning you have to suspend all
| document-deletion programs -- and if you don't, "spoliation of
| evidence" is low-hanging fruit for the opposing counsel to
| attack you and maybe cause you to lose the case.
|
| Back in the day of limited server storage capability, email
| "retention" policies (spelled: purging policies) had at least
| some business justification. That's far less the case now.
|
| To be sure: Footgun emails documenting bad behavior can lead to
| problems. But the root cause is the bad behavior, not the
| emails -- it's far better to face the facts than to delete the
| evidence .
|
| [0] https://etc.cmu.edu/about/last-lecture
| theasisa wrote:
| > Rather than having flow and concentration interrupted by
| incoming message notifications, with email I can easily decide
| when to fetch and process messages.
|
| But emails also notify and therefore interrupt. If you want to
| turn notifications off in your email or only poll new mails when
| you choose you can also mute notifications (or turn on dnd) or
| close the chat app.
|
| Email sucks for chat like communication. It is great for long
| detailed messages. Having both is the best of both worlds.
|
| I have work email and personal email. I have work chat (Slack)
| and personal chat (WhatsApp with friends, Keybase with my
| partner). Choosing which chat app is also a great tool for making
| sure I am dealing with the right audience. I don't want to
| accidentally message my boss about stuff I send to my partner.
| palata wrote:
| "Unified Inbox" (and therefore "Unified Archive") only works if
| you are the annoying person who forces everybody else to contact
| them on their system of choice.
|
| Of course it's convenient when everybody accomodates for you.
| birdalbrocum wrote:
| > Asynchronous communication
|
| > Rather than having flow and concentration interrupted by
| incoming message notifications, with email I can easily decide
| when to fetch and process messages.
|
| Asynchronous communication describes the client-server-client
| model, and both chat and email fall into this category,
| especially since there are peer-to-peer chat programs. What the
| author states sounds to me like a problem with the notification
| model and fetching beyond the user's control. Chat is not
| inherently in "flow."
| layer8 wrote:
| Chat is inherently in flow because you can't manage the
| read/unread status per message, and you can't move messages to
| different folders. When I check for email, I might have a dozen
| new messages, clearly listed one per line, and I can pick which
| to read now and which to read later. I have a clean overview
| with the mailbox listing and the read/unread status. I can
| easily overview 50 or so messages without having to to scroll.
| I can archive the messages I'm done with, while keeping those
| around I still want to handle.
|
| In a chat, the read/unread status is not per-message. It's much
| harder to discern separate exchanges within the same channel,
| and to handle them out-of-order when some are more urgent or
| relevant than others. They also take up substantially more
| visual space than a mailbox listing, so you have a much smaller
| "peephole", making it more difficult to get an overview of what
| is going on in a channel. All this has the effect that people
| treat chat channels as a single continuous flow of messages
| that you catch up with in the order they come in; and the
| messages that scroll out of view, which happens fast, tend to
| go out of mind as well.
| birdalbrocum wrote:
| Ok, good points and I agree with messages as atomic unit of
| communication in mail vs message history per contact as
| atomic unit of communication in mail. This creates a mental
| state of communication flow (like a conversation) and
| inherently a different form than mail (more like receiving a
| mail in your postbox and can able to stack them singular).
| snowfield wrote:
| Mail is great, but messaging has its purpose.
| aboardRat4 wrote:
| Deltachat
| donatj wrote:
| > If you ever exchanged messages on ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger,
| Skype, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Hangouts, GChat
|
| The death of Google Chat is all greatly exaggerated. They've
| largely just rebranded it a bunch of times.
| arcade79 wrote:
| We had the right technologies in the past, but we mismanaged
| them.
|
| Email, Usenet and IRC was great.
|
| Email, however, went dogshit due to spam. From simply having the
| office mail-server, everyone went to Gmail and Office, who didn't
| always want to accept legitimate email. Thus, encouraging more
| folks to move to it.
|
| Now we're in a situation where everyone is "forced" to use crappy
| interfaces, email is htmlified shit, and more and more companies
| require you to use the official client. Which in the case of
| Office365 means a very, very crappy web solution if you're on for
| example Linux. IMAP is often simply turned off due to whomever
| decides security has decided that's a bad idea.
|
| Mailing lists used to be great. But got broken in a variety of
| ways due to spam filtering among other things.
|
| Usenet was great once upon a time, with internal newsgroups etc.
| That died too.
|
| IRC was, and is, an excellent way of having instant messaging.
| Unfortunately it wasn't business friendly enough so only the
| geeks used it. It was a great way to coordinate, though.
| AJ007 wrote:
| Each had a unique set of pitfalls. Out of the 3 Usenet seems to
| be functionally dead for it's original purpose. Perhaps there
| was no possible outcome where usenet would scale along with the
| internet.
|
| The email spam issue is trivially solvable with a contact
| whitelist, which is a UI issue. Email as it is right now is
| definitely very usable, but keep me the hell away from anything
| from Microsoft.
|
| IRC is alive and small. On the optimistic side it outlived
| Skype. Maybe 25 years from now IRC will still be working and
| Discord will be dead. There has been a lot of buy in on Matrix,
| but I'm unconvinced the protocol is going to thrive long term
| due to design choices made.
|
| Reddit is doing what Usenet did. In my ideal world, reddit
| would be part of the fediverse along with Usenet & Twitter and
| the UI would close to hn.
| Arathorn wrote:
| I'm obviously biased (as proj lead for Matrix) but I
| genuinely think Matrix is in a good place going forwards.
| There's a lot of legitimate complaints about the transition
| to Matrix 2.0, and trust & safety still needs a tonne of work
| - but the core protocol and featureset feels pretty good.
| Critically, we just showed we can successfully land pretty
| major changes to the core federation protocol to improve it
| (https://matrix.org/blog/2025/08/project-hydra-improving-
| stat...), which feels pretty liberating in terms of having
| carte blanche to fix the other remaining warts.
|
| What design choices are you worried about? (To confirm that
| they are on the radar).
| stared wrote:
| I love emails. For all mentioned in the post an one more: to
| write an email, people have to _think_ before writing and email,
| even if it is just a few paragraphs. I takes focus, it takes
| asking oneself questions, what makes (in my experience) the
| quality of conversation way higher than talking with the same
| people over chat interface. Moreover, there is time for focus on
| email (both reading and writing) and time to actually work. (Vs
| chats that put some pressure on being always available which is
| something that literally makes deep focus impossible.)
|
| Of course, some people treat emails like there were chats, and
| some people treat chats as if they were emails - yet, what's
| crucial is what's the reference level.
|
| And yeah, in my experience and opinion, chats make us dumper.
| Just the same way as clickbaits and memes catch attention easier
| than in-depth analyzis, they are unlikely to go.
| asa400 wrote:
| I've often wondered why forums never took off at any of the
| companies I've worked at. Has anyone else worked at companies
| that had forums?
|
| All I worked at had email and chat, and some had wikis, but never
| forums, despite having crucial advantages over email (anyone who
| joins later can search them) and wikis (they're conversations
| rather than mutable, outdated documents) and chat (they can't
| interrupt you).
| bojan wrote:
| We used Stack Overflow for Teams, but when the first batch of
| questions got asked and reacted to, the activity subdued
| quickly.
|
| Some time after that we somehow got locked out of our account
| and it was deemed not worth the hassle to try to get it back.
| skydhash wrote:
| Forums is fundamentally community based, where everyone is
| expected to pitch in. While companies are socials, there's not
| a lot of community going around. There are projects, but the
| deciders form a very small subset of the involved people.
|
| By the way, for email, the etiquette would be to include the
| context of the discussion in the invitation for the new person
| coming in. Or send the archive of the discussion to the person.
| But for the latter to happen would require a much better email
| client than what most people are using.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| A decade or two ago it wasn't uncommon to use a single messaging
| program for multiple networks. I have fond memories of using
| Pidgin for a long long time.
|
| This was a single program which spoke to all the networks, not a
| set of tabs rendering disparate web views. A single contact list,
| and the same UI for all conversations. You'd basically forget who
| used MSN, who used Yahoo Messenger, who used XMPP, etc...
|
| I'm not sure why we don't have the same for the current set of
| trending proprietary networks. Sure, they make it harder for
| third parties to connect, but proprietary networks never really
| collaborated on making it easier.
|
| Maybe there's just less folk willing to invest free time in
| making desktop messaging apps?
|
| In theory, XMPP (or similar protocols) would simplify this
| nowadays: just have a single client and protocol and connect to
| proprietary networks via gateways. We have gateways for some
| networks, but desktop messaging clients have really stagnated.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Apparently pidgin is still maintained and has plugins for
| recent chat systems. Just looked a few days at the version 3
| announcement.
| gehsty wrote:
| I don't like the friction of forcing a specific messaging app or
| protocol on people so just default to what everyone is using
| (WhatsApp) TBH I don't really get the moral outcry over using it
| (or any other messaging app).
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > I don't really get the moral outcry
|
| "Dumb fucks trust me".
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