Why do people say email is broken?

As a way to send information is email unsurpassed, however from the receivers perspective the signal to noise ratio quickly favors noise.. and by that time it is difficult to adjust.<p>The real failing is that the interaction paradigms for tuning the noise to signal ratio are extremely manual and difficult to verify if it has been adjusted or filtered properly once set.<p>I could be as easy as choosing who I care about, what I care about, and when I care about it.. but instead we are forced to set up smart filters, formulas etc and assume that we wont miss anything important.<p>Also, 5 clicks to unsubscribe is another kind of fail altogether that makes pruning the inbox time consuming and hardly worth the effort when compared to just letting the spam, coupon pepper your real communications. Wouldn't it be nice if email automatically park those offers on a side bar? ..along with the rest of the no-replies? Keeping the conversations and action items front and center.

I guess it depends on how many emails you receive per day. Works fine for me, but I'm not sure once you're over 100 per day...

I feel it should be more than it is.<p>A great deal of what comes into my mailbox are action items: Fix this. Attend this meeting. Do this by end of the week. Tell me what you think. Don't forget your appointment at the dentist.<p>What should happen is that 'mail' decides 'fix this' goes to a service desk, 'attend this' goes to a calendar, and so on.<p>It is not. It's all manual with a veneer of pretty mouse clicks and it sucks.

I don't think it's broken. I just personally feel the information should be displayed better. Email just needs a better UI/UX. For example, Microsoft did a great job with the outlook interface, it's still the same old email and I can pretty much do everything I can do with Gmail with it but I signed up because the UI looks much better. I don't feel so "bombarded" when I log in

I don't think email is broken. Personally a tool I really believe could somewhat replace email was Google Wave. It was a fantastic tool...just Google has not been able to market it. What I believe instead is that e-mail could be used as a transport for additional structured information. Today it happens with vCard, or ics but it could be much more I believe.

A related discussion we had about this few days ago : <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4228402" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4228402</a>

I've always been skeptical of how big this problem really is. People who need more power/flex are probably the minority.

<a href="http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html</a> Read #2

For most people, I think it's dealing with the spam that makes it feel broken.

For most people, it works well as it is. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Because we want it to do much more, and it can only do the limited things it was designed to do 30+ years ago.

Mine works just fine. :P