What are the biggest problems with email?
Peter Saxton
11 replies
We are looking at replacing emails with something better. We think this can be done while keeping your email address as the identifier for you, necessary so we don't all have to send out new contact information before the system is useful. Alternatives like slack just add more distraction and they are tricky to use for conversations which aren't within one company.
Some of the main problems we have with email are.
- Loosing people on a thread because someone forgets to hit reply all.
- Not easily being able to leave a thread because people keep replying from old emails.
- Having to search a whole conversation to find the relevant piece of information, worse if you aren't really sure if the conversation has concluded or not.
- Hard to format nicely.
It would be great to hear what problems you have before we share too much the solutions we think would help make it better
Replies
Sergey Krasotin@krasotin
The most annoying thing is definitely a lack of feedback! As a sender, I don't know if the recipient has read my email or no. In messengers I can immediately see the status of my message and change my follow-ups accordingly, while with emails you just ping colleagues with annoying "just checking in, did you see my last email?
Share
Replacing emails with something sounds as something very ambitious to achieve IMHO!
Email is now as regular a thing as a verb in English language. It's a habit.
I am not sure if you mean Improving emailing experience with better
- Message threads
- Visibility of people
- Capability to highlight important things
- Mass messaging (with a standard format) and make a categorisation of products (instead of a plain Promotions or Other tab): with some data to it (community based). Like number of people that actually opened, liked etc.
It can be difficult to keep on top of daily filing - particularly when working with multiple clients across multiple email IDs. This can make it difficult to keep on top of response and delivery deadlines. It can also be difficult to find the 'nugget of info' you know is sitting somewhere in your inbox!
CEO Short List
Opt-In emails are very valuable, everything else I'm not that partial to. When people invite you to their inbox every day, week or month, that is powerful.
Search is really big problem for me, there should be something else, not only 'word - search'
I would say:
1) spam
2) it's a catch-all for messages. Unless you setup rules, everything goes in one place.
3) It's not chat and vice versa. I'd love short messages to look like chat and long ones like emails.
-spam
-carbon copying to multiple recipients.
-can be too formal and discussing over emails gets really messy with long threads.
Lucky Carrot
1. I use Mailchimp and sometimes it is hard to send all campaigns to all the emails in your list (except unsubscribed ones of course). After sending the campaign MailChimp shows the wrong emails and it's hard to find the right ones. So those emails don't get the other campaigns (I should find another way to reach them).
2. Email content length is a challenge too. It shouldn't be too long not to bore the recipient and too short so that you can include all the important points. Sometimes long emails work better, sometimes not.
3. Design- MailChimp doesn't provide catchy templates so very often I can't create the design I want.
My annoyance with email is that it can be easily ignored and we wouldn't be the wiser.
Though you said you weren't keen on alternatives, I think I have the one for you. Clariti https://bit.ly/3hbHQaT is a web-based app which literally targets all the problems that you've stated. I really think it's worth checking out.
Searching format, and that only way to keep something as a reminder is by leaving it unread 🙄