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When did work email become an I.T. redheaded stepchild

bigred

Penultimate Amazing
bigred
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My experience and talking to others seems similar that people don't want to correspond at work via email anymore. It's all online chat. Short-sighted to say the least IMO. Chat is great for immediate feedback, but when you have less immediate communication needs, esp one in which you want a conversation "trail," email trumps chat.
 
Different tools have different uses. Email is, in theory, good for keeping records, but it is hard to find an email that is more than a week or two old.
 
rjh01 said:
Different tools have different uses. Email is, in theory, good for keeping records, but it is hard to find an email that is more than a week or two old.
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?? Because?
 
I don't get that either. Email was invaluable for keeping track of stuff and recording how problems got dealt with previously. It was my work archive. That was, until my employer decided to routinely delete all email over 3 years old.

Sure, you could tag important stuff to be retained for 7 years instead, but it's not important until you need it and by then it's gone.
 
I've come around on having lots of slack threads. I like being able to review the information in a conversation that I wasn't originally a part of. That's much harder with email.

I don't find there to be much difference with finding old data.

I can link to a slack discussion of a problem in a Jira ticket without having to paste the entire email thread.
 
I suspect the move away from email is precisely because management don't know what their employees wrote and would rather not have years of potential liability archived.
 
zooterkin said:
Is it? For me, the benefit of chat is that it doesn't require immediate response. You and the other person can respond when they have time.
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Same here. To me Slack and sametime replaced a lot of phone calls and meetings more than emails. It’s less intrusive than a ringing phone, especially if immersed in something but still gets answered. Or it might be something that needs a moment’s thought or digging.
 
Thinking about it, in both IBM and HSBC email discussions could diverge. Especially in situations where you have people in different areas who may need to drag in other people. In some cases even switching languages.
It was easier to ping say my usual French colleague via whatever messaging we used at the time and ask him to confirm that <thing> would work and then we’d confirm to interested parties later via email. I nearly typed “x would work” but that sounds ridiculous post Musk.
 
BowlOfRed said:
I've come around on having lots of slack threads. I like being able to review the information in a conversation that I wasn't originally a part of. That's much harder with email.
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It can be, fair point.

The devil's in the details; not saying email is always better of course. But at least in my experience recently, email is being treated like kryponite...God forbid one should have to send one out.

And I think it's far better for things that aren't immediate because it's far less intrusive and far easier to sort on by title, date, etc. IMO slack should only be used for more immediate discussion needed.
 
zooterkin said:
Is it? For me, the benefit of chat is that it doesn't require immediate response. You and the other person can respond when they have time.
Click to expand...
Strange, I would think it's exactly the opposite. If I don't answer a text message almost immediately, I usually forget about it. Then it's hard to find it again. Emails are all in one place and can be (re)marked as Unread if I want to deal with it later.
 
I guess that shows how everyone's experience is different. I got a lot of email too, but usually found it easy to zoom in on something....easier than Slack or Teams at least....
 
Definitely not seeing this phenomenon where I work. We use a mixture of emails and chat messages, and if there's something relevant to a project or an ongoing ticket we just copy the chat and throw it in the ticket, or in an email.

Then again, we have to abide by FOIA rules.
 
Thanks; I guess I'm curious if it's a trending thing or unique to my experience.
 
At my workplace, IMs are for casual chatting, quick informal questions, and on rare occasions emergency summons to an actual telephone call or meeting in progress. Serious work is always conveyed through email. It's more formal, easier to attach files if needed, and easier to forward on to relevant parties. And keep a trail going with the history of what's been going on, should newer recipients need background they can just scroll down.
 
I disagree. Email is a decidedly different format than chat or chat history. IMO it's far easier to find things in email and (ironically) far easier to have a "paper trail" of conversation on a topic; it's all there in the most recent email. You can also conveniently sort on subject, sender, timeframes, etc. Chat is much more limited and IMO often a royal PITA if you have numerous channels, which fragments things. No such fragmentation with email; it's all there in one place.
 
bigred said:
I disagree. Email is a decidedly different format than chat or chat history. IMO it's far easier to find things in email and (ironically) far easier to have a "paper trail" of conversation on a topic; it's all there in the most recent email. You can also conveniently sort on subject, sender, timeframes, etc. Chat is much more limited and IMO often a royal PITA if you have numerous channels, which fragments things. No such fragmentation with email; it's all there in one place.
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Agree to all of the above.

Similarly, email can be broken up into folders.

In my case, I'd have a folder for each project I was on, and sub-folders within project where necessary.

This meant that it was trivially easy for me to archive emails alongside all of the other project documentation.
 
bigred said:
I disagree. Email is a decidedly different format than chat or chat history. IMO it's far easier to find things in email and (ironically) far easier to have a "paper trail" of conversation on a topic; it's all there in the most recent email. You can also conveniently sort on subject, sender, timeframes, etc. Chat is much more limited and IMO often a royal PITA if you have numerous channels, which fragments things. No such fragmentation with email; it's all there in one place.
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Ah, nope. Any one email trail, assuming a series of simply replies back and forth, is just the same functionally as a copy/reply chat conversation between two users. The only functional difference is chats are stored centrally in one repository and shared, while email messages are (usually) stored in separate repositories. This separation is what historically has provided any email retention security (let's assume perfect backups ;)).

Of course, there's actually far more complexity to this, technically. For example, if two users share a cloudy email facility, e.g. Gmail, the emails are in a central shared repository, so their email trails are, in effect, chat conversations. They are also subject to whatever Gmail's retention security model is at the time (LOL).

You also need to take into account if replying to chats and emails includes quoting what they are replying to. In neither case is this absolutely necessary, but conventionally, email users do while chat users don't.

I take the point about filing emails while not filing chats. But again, that's convention, not any particular technical limitation. Most modern chat facilities do have ways to file and catagorise chats, but perhaps not quite in the same way as email folders. In short, it's whatever you get used to, and what you use the tools for.
 
Ah, yep. :) But we're not going to convince each other, so moving on
 
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