uberchet

I remember reading this article when it came out. It's pretty terrifying.

I dunno.

I think it's a continuum, for one thing.

Phone calls are clearly sync. But IM on the desktop is, in my working life, much closer to sync than email.

I think of phone texts as attempts at unobtrusive but still mostly synchronous communication.

I can only speak to my experience, but email is very very much a part of our world in our software company. It's WAY better than Slack or other IM/group chat tool for search and archiving later -- and, let's be honest, a WHOLE LOT of stuff gets decided in email, so that's pretty important.

With a distributed team, it's even moreso. Plus, since we're distributed, the idea of email-as-document (with rich formatting and inline images) is just that much more normal.

Where? My inbox and outbox.

Obviously, people use email in different ways. This thread seems to have attracted a large number of people who exist in a text-only email world, but nearly every email I send or receive includes at least some rich formatting, and it's very common for us to include inline images of screenshots or other graphics as part of these emails.

And we're not web designers. We make project management software.

So: for me, mostly work email, though I certainly get no small number of personal mails with photos attached.

Again, that YOUR experience with email doesn't include rich text or inline images outside your spam folder doesn't mean those features are valuable and useful to other people.

I'd argue, in turn, that your experience, regardless of how many people were involved, is divergent from the way in which email itself is moving in the broader market of users.

Images as links to something else, that require an additional step, are an inferior substitute to inline images. Here in 2017, it's possible to build an email that includes tables or screenshots or other rich media that exist as part of the email itself.

This is commonly viewed as a benefit. 20 years ago, I, too, was resistant to the idea that email should be something other than plain text, but I was wrong. That ship has saild. Email today is a rich document, and rich documents often include meaningful inline images that should be stored with the document.

Again, that YOU don't like this doesn't mean it's not useful or widely used by other people.

"Literally zero reason?" Seriously?

I submit your understanding of how email works for most people in 2017 is outdated.

Email with inline images is common, useful, and not going anywhere.

Sure they should. It depends on the tools available and the culture of the organization.

You don't get to dictate what features of email people should or shouldn't use.

Apple's Mail.app has a great feature that allows inline markup of images, which is a huge boon for interface discussions and tech support emails at my company.

The extra step and use of an external program is pretty inelegant, IMO, when there exist clients that will just show you the damn image in the mail window.

>Normal people don't put images in emails

This is absolutely not true. Generally speaking, people whose experience leads them to think this are in weird isolated silos where highly technical folks are overrepresented.

> I would argue that for most people who actually still use email for communication with peers, images and attachments are an afterthought.

Are you actually convinced of that, or are you being inflammatory? Because, in 2017, it's hilariously far afield of most folks' email use patterns both at work and at home. Do you only ever communicate using text -- and plain text at that?

I work for a small software company - ie, full of nerds. We use screencaps marked up in email ALL THE TIME to communicate about changes and whatnot. Sure, I guess we could put it in a Word doc or HTML doc, but why bother when we can do it in the email client?

I use emacs, but exclusively for orgmode. I thought about mutt years ago, and realized I get and receive too much mail with rich content for that to work.

How does an emacs window, even with mu4e, represent emails with meaningful formatting, inline graphics, etc? I'm guessing by launching an external viewer, but even that would slow me down quite a bit.

I don't think it's a thing we can blame one side or the other for.

In the last 2-3 generations, the US has experienced a pretty huge shift from rural to urban. The difference in life experience between those two environments is pretty stark.

Someone whose family has always (let's say 2-3 generations) lived in, say, rural or suburban Mississippi is going to have exposure to and basic knowledge of firearms. Someone whose family has always lived in LA, or New York, or Chicago, probably won't.

As with many things, group A has little interest in the lives of group B, and vice versa, and so you get enormous gulfs of understanding. Firearms isn't the only one.

This is good advice. I grew up hunting and shooting, but in adulthood have come to agree that reasonable gun control is really something we have to do. However, the gun vs. anti-gun divide in the US is as pure a split as exists on any policy position. Few on one side know or understand the thinking or positions of any on the other.

People who don't shoot often don't know even the most basic things, like what differentiates a rifle from a shotgun, or what happens when a modern pistol runs out of bullets. They don't get the vast difference between a .22 and a 9mm on any level (size of projectile, powder load, etc.). And they certainly don't understand why pursuing something like a quote-unquote assault weapon ban is legislatively and logically difficult.