---
title: "Email"
url: https://stanko.io/email-Hp5pkUZLCrw4
author: Stanko Krtalic Rusendic
published: 2022-11-20
updated: 2026-02-15
tags: [rant, technology]
---

# Email

For me, instant messaging is overwhelming. Keeping up with
[Slack](https://slack.com/) or [Discord](https://discord.com/) messages often
feels like drinking from a fire hose of information. And some features of these
apps bring out the worst in people. I wish these apps were more like email,
because email got a lot of things right.

My biggest complaint with instant messaging is how distracting it is.
Notifications pop up to grab your attention for every message, most of which
aren’t intended for me.

This is a necessary byproduct of organizing communication into channels. On the
surface this is a great idea to focus the discussion on a topic, but in practice
it heavily hinges on the netiquette of the participants.

Like every group chat ever, a channel will spawn off-topic conversations that
will ping everyone in the channel.

Eventually, somebody will start discussing sandwiches in a channel for handling
outages. Or someone will start discussing a baseball game in the general
channel. Both of these are real examples.

I feel like the only real option in such cases is to mute or leave the channel,
but that’s not always an option. I can’t leave the outage channel, and I can’t
mute it. So what now?

Topics (or sub-chats) are a great way to combat this. But again, they hinge on
the netiquette of the participants. If nobody uses threads they are useless. If
too many are created, they become hard to follow.

Then there is the instant part of instant messaging that entices some people to
write down their stream of consciousness for others to interpret, instead of
taking the time to organize their thoughts into a sentence.

You

Know

The

Type

Of

People

Who

Send

Messages

Like

This

Just

So

They

Can

Write

Something

Instantly

Then there is the other kind of instant in instant messaging - the instant
response - to which some people feel entitlement.

I’ve had people ping me with “I saw you replied in the channel 15 min ago, but
not to me”. Or people ping me with a question and 3 min later sending another
one saying that my lack of response will be considered a no. And I had people
ping me with “Are you there?” every 5 min.

I don’t know why instant messaging brings out the worst in people. But I know
that a lot of people choose to always appear offline to avoid these problems.

Which brings me to email. It never had an online status to begin with, every
conversation is a thread, there is no expectation of an instant response, and
people usually write full sentence responses.

Some of these “features” were technological or practical limitations of the
time, and some evolved out of the way people used email.

But email evolved into a great, distraction free, way to communicate by using
these friction points to its advantage.

It has its problems, like not having a mechanism to leave a thread, or having
some way to track branching threads. But apps like [Hey](https://www.hey.com/)
have shown that it’s possible to resolve these problems. And showed that the
federated design of email allows anyone to innovate and improve [this
50-year-old protocol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email).

There are so many wonderful solutions on top of email out there. Apps like
[Mailbrew](https://mailbrew.com/) - which combines RSS, Reddit, Twitter even
weather forecasts into a single daily email.

Anyone can send you an email. Which is a blessing and a curse thanks to
spammers. But I’ve had wonderful conversations over the years that have
cold-mailed me after stumbling upon one of my projects or articles. And, again,
apps like Hey add ways to screen incoming emails before they end up in your
inbox.

I recently tried [Twist](https://twistapp.com/) and found that by mimicking
email it became a better instant messenger - if you can call it that. It only
shows that there is still a lot of room left to improve instant messengers. At
least the work-focused ones like Slack.

Email is still the best communication method for me.