Comment by Boldened15
3 days ago
Email is a dated form of communication, that's why every other message platform will let you just like and heart stuff.
3 days ago
Email is a dated form of communication, that's why every other message platform will let you just like and heart stuff.
It's a paper trail for me. Companies, as we saw recently, can do whatever they want on company chat platforms. Emails are nearly impossible to fully delete if they ever have to escalate to a lawsuit, and can (YMMV based on policy) let you BCC important trails to your personal email.
If it's that important you can screenshot it. If you're BCCing every email you sent to your personal email that is (or should be) an IT policy violation.
Screenshots are trivial to forge. It is impossible to forge email that has passed through a server with proper DKIM setup.
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It’s no different than using IMAP or POP3 to download your messages. This is the beauty and curse of email. It’s sometimes too transparent. I prefer it.
Yeah. It's not every email (I can probably count the number of times I did this on one hand). But if I feel like they're trying to bury some lead or simply want to CYA, I will try to at least download the email to the local machine (perfectly legimate) and BCC myself (Grey area) as an immitation of 3 backup strategies. I've never had to utilize thar BCC, fortunately.
But yes, phone screenshot is another strategy with much less grey area. I'm just becoming more and more paranoid of some potential defense trying to accuse my photo of being doctored, especially with more and more AI tools available.
Why is chat not a paper trail? Just yesterday I found a chat message that I had written in 2019 and I was surprised that I already back then knew things I did not know yesterday.
(We are use zulip for chat which is better than everything else I have used since irc. But the search is too limited for someone who knows regexes.)
>Why is chat not a paper trail?
Many reasons. First, chat doesn't exist. What exists is scores of incompatible chat apps.
I use WhatsApp but I consider WhatsApp messages throwaway because I keep losing them anyway. They are scattered across multiple phones with no way to merge them. Backups are platform specific. Exports don't contain any metadata and can't be imported.
"Chat" is a useless mess, not a paper trail.
For email, I have consistent backups with metadata across many email providers and email clients going back to 2008.
Because a company can revoke your access to the chat at any point in time. It's a one-sided paper trail.
You can have an offline copy of emails and you can BCC them to your personal account if you want.
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Because e-mail is naturally self-replicating and not bound to organizational boundaries, in ways chat isn't.
Chat messages tend to exist in one place only (vendors' servers), with maybe a transient local copy that gets wiped over time, or "for privacy reasons" (like Messenger switching to E2EE, effectively wiping cached history on any device that went through the transition). Chat message is an object, it's designed to exist in a single place, and everything else is a pointer to it, or a transient cache.
E-mails, in contrast, are always copied in full. You send an e-mail to me, you retain an independent copy, I get an independent copy, and a bunch of servers in between us keep an independent copy too, even if briefly. I forward your e-mail somewhere, more people and servers get their copies. I reply back to you, more independent copies, that also quote the previous messages, embedding even more copies that are even more independent. This makes it very similar to paper correspondence (particularly when photocopy machines are involved), i.e. impossible for a single party to unilaterally eradicate in practice.
And then chat vendors implement silly features like ability to retroactively unsend a message, force-deleting it from recipients' devices too (it may still exist in backups, but vendors refuse to let you access those, even with a GDPR request). In e-mail land, that's fundamentally not possible.
(Microsoft tried to bolt it onto their corporate e-mail software, but it only works in Outlook/Exchange land, and it's easy to disable (at least was, in OG Desktop Outlook - not the still broken New Outlook Desktop Web App). I discovered this when I once saw an e-mail I was reading suddenly disappear from my Outlook, which prompted me to find the right setting to disable honoring unsend requests.)
So, come discovery time, critical chat history may turn out impossible to find, and any deeper search will require forcing cooperation of the chat operator. E-mails, on the other hand, tend to turn up, because someone, somewhere, almost certainly has a copy.
Chat is a paper trail in finance at least. For regulatory purposes, bank personnel are not allowed to delete even their WhatsApp and other text messaging app info from their phones.
"serious business" and "serious stuff" still happens over email, and in the same way, even "more serious business stuff" happens over snail mail still.
Well, Microsoft did add "reactions" to Outlook and has been universally hated for it.
Wasn't the hate because of a botched implementation that ended up spamming the original sender or something?
Yeah, the reactions are just email messages with special headers, which as you say ends up spamming people who don't use Outlook. I think the hate was a mix of reaction to bad implementation and the concept in general.
I conduct all of my business either in person, via email, or by phone. I use email when I want a paper trail.
I have 5000+ unread items.
I've skimmed maybe 50% of them, but not enough to consider them "read". It's 99% bullshit. Even legitimate email is spam these days.
I'm too busy with other fake work to need to additional fake work managing pointless email comms.
I've adopted the inbox zero approach. If it's important it gets reclassified onto my task list with start and end dates, if it's useful info it gets filed, and everything else goes into trash.
At this point I am thinking my Thunderbird should probably just unify the Inbox view and the Task view, since it would be a more accurate representation of how I view email.
I thought just now, isn't inbox zero just a cosmetic difference?
For you: important things become tasks, useful things are filed, and everything else gets trashed.
For me: important things get opened and replied to. Useful things are starred (and opened). Everything else stays untouched.
And that pesky unread number is irrelevant because I mute all notifications. I'm not discounting your method, I am just now realizing the circle of it all.
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Outlook now lets me like and heart emails, which feels weird but there it is.