"[...] People seem to hate email for the same reasons they once loved it. Email's underlying triumph, the quality that made it revolutionary, was that you could instantly deliver a written message to someone even if they weren't there to receive it. [...] Email is neutral, meaning that anyone can email anyone else with an email address. If you have a person's email address, your message will be delivered no matter who you are - whether the recipient is your oldest friend, your granddaughter, your boss's boss, or Beyoncé. The year the web was born, this flattening effect was astonishing. Anyone in an organization could communicate directly and immediately with anyone else, "regardless of rank" [...]"
- Adrienne LaFrance, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/what-comes-after-email/422625/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/what-...</a><p>I'd like to add one more very important aspect: you don't need to register with any or with yet another service, which will eventually fade into oblivion within a few years - or which will become so ignorant to privacy, like Facebook, that you end up deleting their apps and accounts.<p>Email is a set of protocol and thus it _will_ outlive any centalised, closed, walled garden.<p>(BTW this is what decentralisation people should understand: you need to build services using common protocols, not services which can be installed; mastodon is a bad example, activityfeeds or linked data are good ones)
Maybe in US this holds, but things may be different in different places.<p>I'm a Chinese living in the bay area. I think people here treat E-mails as part of their daily life probably because most of them began to use it before the mobile internet is a thing. On the contrary, in China where the majority internet users are mobile-savvy, WeChat is the new email. Actually E-mails are only for official communications there, and I don't think official communications can be treated as "social networks".<p>I'm wondering if the same thing is happening in other developing countries where people first touched facebook/whatsapp before even knowing E-mail exists.
The most important thing about email is that you get your own, immutable copy of every message. You can keep your copy and know that it will be exactly the same when you look at it next week, it won't have been silently (or even not silently) "corrected".<p>It's both a blessing and a curse, as anybody who's accidentally emailed the wrong people or hit send before finishing editing knows, but it's the most powerful thing about email (and SMS or even fax for that matter!) - you get your own copy.
This is tangential, but needs to be stated:<p>What I've learned from email newletters is that Microsoft Outlook needs to die a swift and horrible death.<p>There is absolutely no good reason why we should have to create email newsletters that require tables for layout.
A shameless plug, but if you like HN and email, my side-project, <a href="http://www.hackernewsletter.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.hackernewsletter.com/</a>, might be worth a look. Rolling past 50k subscribers this month.
I enjoy email, but get frustrated when conversations get long. Here is my favourite quote about email, which explains the issue lovingly:<p><pre><code> --
A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
Q: Why is top posting frowned upon?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in email?</code></pre>
So glad to see the pro-email comments! People seem so down on email, I made buttons for those of us who still like it: <a href="http://giantcatco.bigcartel.com/" rel="nofollow">http://giantcatco.bigcartel.com/</a>
> For others, it might mean one original article blurred out in a newsletter. (Inside’s newsletter CMS is built to handle toggling between paid-for and free content.)<p>Anyone know of an open source or paid Newsletter Management CMS? I'm working on a content site like inside, for a very small sports niche, and am thinking of making it a daily newsletter with paid subscriptions, instead of a regular website driven by WordPress or some other CMS, with ads, which would be super annoying and not monetize well these days.
This is an interesting alternative to having a newspaper website: a newspaper via email.<p>Not the first, I'm sure, but possibly the best organised.
Besides search-ability, one thing I love about email is that I know the sender isn't going to be notified when I read it. Contrast that with FB where I know the sender will see a little "read" notification, and then I have pressure to respond, etc.
Google's Inbox is basically an email client reimagined as a social network feed. They might have cocked up g+ (and whatever is was before that), but this one they've done pretty well (as long as you don't think of it as just another email client).
If you're more into the social part of networking than newsletters and don't mind a bit of privacy, Snackis might be worth a look:<p><a href="https://github.com/andreas-gone-wild/snackis" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/andreas-gone-wild/snackis</a>
I was intrigued, so I just looked at the "Inside Premium" plan -- $10/mo for one newsletter?? You can get a digital subscription to Washington Post and NYT for basically half that!
Been a subscriber to a few of their newsletters for a some months now and have to say the content is great. Can't wait to see what else the Inside team rolls out.