I assume there are people who read these things, otherwise companies wouldn’t send me so many of them. I seem to get daily spam from literally any company I’ve ever interacted with in any way, and they are long boys full of text and pictures that Thunderbird helpfully hides from me but I presume are full of jagged brightly coloured stars saying “DEAL DEAL DEAL” or whatever.
Mostly I click delete on these emails faster than the email client can even load them, but every so often I peruse a few sentences of the trade specific items that give a headline that promises actually interesting information… but its always just more marketing guff disguised as a news story.
It’s obviously making someone money to spam the world constantly, so I assume someone is reading these things and acting on them.
- Who are you?
- Why are you interacting with the spam and making it viable for companies to keep sending it?
- What do you do that you have so much free time you can allocate some of it to consuming it?
That’s cool and all, but do you read any of them?
(To kind of answer OPs question myself, no. To be honest, I don’t read any email unless I specifically search for it. Not even at work. Email is an antiquated service and it needs to die.)
Yes I read some marketing emails, the ones I don’t unsubscribe from. Many brands and stores are completely online, and email is the quickest and least invasive way to keep in the loop. For example, I collect vinyl, and I stay subscribed to a few of the stores I frequent that I know when they have good deals or send personalized discounts for repeat business. Others are local breweries and businesses we like. It’s the easiest way to get notified about events, new releases, etc.
This would get me fired on an almost daily basis. Weekly for sure. Different people need email for different things.
I am probably in a unique situation and I probably shouldn’t have disregarded other people’s circumstances. Sales and customer relations jobs are probably at the top of the list as far as where email is very important. It is very much company size dependent as well. A “message queue” (email) is probably ideal for companies that work across multiple times zones.
However, for smaller companies like the ones I work for now (1000 people max, usually), Slack is perfect.
My gripes are probably more focused around the antiquated email protocol in combination with the company culture that evolved around email. That is more realistic, me thinks.
So what communication are you using that is basically universally used?
I do daily, get my coffee and read my emails, of it’s something no I dont want I unsub, otherwise I mark it as read and archive it, takes a few minutes, at work we use email a lot it’s just easier than dealing with teams search, otherwise if it’s just our team we use JIRA