What emails suck at is communication between multiple people in a work setting. That's why Slack, Teams, and others emerged and got popular.
For example:
- When multiple people respond to the same email, the email "thread" branches out into a tree. If the tree branches out multiple times, keeping track of all the replies gets messy.
- While most clients can show you the thread/tree structure of an email chain, it only works if you've been on every email in the chain. If you get CC'd later, you'll just see a single email and navigating that is messy.
- Also if you get CC'd later, you can't access any attachments from the chain.
- You can link to a Slack/Teams conversation and as long as it's in a public channel, anyone with the link can get in on it (for example you have a conversation about a proposed feature which then turns into a task -> you describe the task simply and link "more info in this slack convo"), you can't do that with Emails (well I guess you could export a .eml file, but it has the same issue as getting CC'd later)
- When a thread no longer interests you, you can mute it in Slack/Teams. You can't realistically do that with emails, as most people will just hit "reply all"
- But also sometimes people will hit "reply" instead of "reply all" by a mistake and a message doesn't get delivered to everyone in the thread.
For example:
- When multiple people respond to the same email, the email "thread" branches out into a tree. If the tree branches out multiple times, keeping track of all the replies gets messy.
- While most clients can show you the thread/tree structure of an email chain, it only works if you've been on every email in the chain. If you get CC'd later, you'll just see a single email and navigating that is messy.
- Also if you get CC'd later, you can't access any attachments from the chain.
- You can link to a Slack/Teams conversation and as long as it's in a public channel, anyone with the link can get in on it (for example you have a conversation about a proposed feature which then turns into a task -> you describe the task simply and link "more info in this slack convo"), you can't do that with Emails (well I guess you could export a .eml file, but it has the same issue as getting CC'd later)
- When a thread no longer interests you, you can mute it in Slack/Teams. You can't realistically do that with emails, as most people will just hit "reply all"
- But also sometimes people will hit "reply" instead of "reply all" by a mistake and a message doesn't get delivered to everyone in the thread.