Re: Mail is worse than everything except all the alternatives, was Service outages planned for April 25

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 4/30/22 12:24, [e-mail] wrote:

>> Email is still around, and is still used for business.   But for most interpersonal communications, email has become the medium of last resort, after social media sites and SMS.  And in addition to the other reasons that cause people to prefer other media, spam filters have made cross-domain email notoriously unreliable.
> Social media is more for updated info to everyone than messaging to individuals.  They don’t support messages to a subset, except through SMS or their own variant.

At least FB and LI (which is as much of social media as I've tried) 
provide "messaging to individuals" (or maybe only to one individual at a 
time).   But whenever I meet someone new in "real life" and we want to 
exchange contact information, the first thing the other person 
inevitably says is "find me on Facebook".

> SMS, Facebook messages, Twitter DMs, and other messaging is considered immediate and intrusive, just shy of a phone call in terms of “pay attention now”. They’re also often more limited in terms of what can be sent (total length, attachment size, etc.), vs. email.

Agree about the limitations.  As to whether the message is considered 
immediate and intrusive, I suspect that depends on whether the recipient 
prefers what I call an interrupt-driven (or maybe distraction-driven) 
lifestyle.   But lots of people seem to expect that whatever message 
they send, via whatever channel, will be seen immediately.

> If you want to send a message that isn’t urgent to a directed group of people, what can you use besides email?

Maybe not much.  But I've actually heard people say that it's rude to 
send an email to multiple people, who will then probably receive endless 
replies to all.

Keith