Streams: Mail 3.0 concept

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Style Pass

2021-06-28 23:00:07

It’s hard to believe people still use email. It has so many flaws yet still remains die-hard to replace. The amount of email shortcomings can compete only with the amount of email usages.

Google’s Inbox is an attempt to fix non-communication part of email. It claims to solve problem of managing todos, reminders, notifications and subscriptions in your inbox. With Google’s resources, they sure can fix that by categorizing every service and subscription provider on a planet and show their emails in the best possible way. Yet, from a history perspective, it’s some polishing (ok, a lot of it) on top of completely messed up foundation. Most importantly, it does not fix communications.

Email was envisioned as a metaphor of a post office mail. Real-world, pencil-on-paper letters are good for very specific type of communications. Transferred to the internet, email inherited these limitations: electronic messages are not real-time, they’re hard to manage in huge amounts, they work best for person-to-person dialogs.

Working with email at per-message level makes communication heavy, slow and boring. It’s awkward to ping somebody with email, or ask “HYD”, or say “ok”. Waste of a letter, right? You need subject, you need greeting, you need signature. Well, you don’t, but that’s kind of a format, an etiquette. Think about it: in most clients you have to “open” messages (with click, but anyway) to see what’s inside.