72 lines
4.0 KiB
HTML
72 lines
4.0 KiB
HTML
<p>I'm not sure if I've touched upon this subject before, but e-mail is
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perhaps my favorite means of communication, especially for in-depth
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discussions. Despite the surge in modern instant-messaging, and the
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continued reliability of snail-mail, I find e-mail to be the perfect
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middle-ground that suites my needs.</p>
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<p>To start, comparing e-mail to snail-mail, we see that e-mail is...
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well, faster and more flexible. Sure, it's not nearly as personal as a
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hand-written letter, but it's nearly instant and much more appropriate
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for anything technology related - which seems to be most of what I or
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any other person does nowadays, mostly by sending links. What's more,
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it's also cheaper since you probably already have an internet
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connection - otherwise I'd wonder how you're reading this post.</p>
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<p>But of course, nobody is really comparing e-mail to snail-mail
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anymore, but rather to the new means of instant-messaging. However, even
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in this regard I see several advantages to e-mail.</p>
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<p>First and foremost, e-mail is a universal protocol. For those that
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may not understand what this means, notice how anyone with any e-mail
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service provider or any e-mail client can send an e-mail to another
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person and it arrives (mostly) the same. This is because the protocol
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used to send, receive, and format e-mails is standard and universal.
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Every e-mail client and provider has to follow that standard. They can
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add new features, but they must all support the same basic
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functionality. Compare this to instant-messaging programs where there
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are thousands of them, and most of them use their own protocols, which
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they don't even make public so others can develop applications to
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connect to their network. Instead, we're all forced to install several
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of these applications, and none of them function exactly the way we'd
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want them to. There have been efforts to create such a standard for
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instant-messaging, but overall it has failed. The best attempt at this
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is the
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat"
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target="_blank">IRC protocol</a>.</p>
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<p>Secondly, e-mail is made for larger messages. As you may have
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noticed, I like writing very long blocks of text. Especially when I am
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discussing a very complex subject. Not only that, but generally my ideas
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aren't very well organized, nor are they linear, so being able to type
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out an e-mail and go over it, edit, amend, etc. helps me to make a more
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coherent message. Also, because of the nature of e-mail, I'm less likely
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to get interrupted in the middle of writing a response.</p>
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<p>Thirdly, it's easier to write more complex responses to an e-mail
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that touches upon various subjects. This can be done through
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style"
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target="_blank" >in-line responses</a>,
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and having
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversation_threading"
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target="_blank" >multiple threads to the same conversation</a>. This
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helps keep the conversation itself organized. Of course, not all clients
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support threading or make in-line responses easier, but there are those
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(good) clients that do.</p>
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<p>Fourthly, in e-mail everything is pure text. From the header
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information, to the body of the e-mail, to the signature at the end,
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everything is done in pure text that you can read and edit (if your
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e-mail client allows you to). Sure, someone may choose to have their
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e-mail client write the e-mail in HTML - please don't do this, it's
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cancer, you should almost never need to do this - but even HTML is just
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markup text that can be (semi) readable.</p>
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<p>Finally, e-mail is stable. Something that annoys me with a lot of
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instant-messaging programs is that they're always changing things, and
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since I'm forced to use their clients, I'm forced to accept their
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changes. With e-mail I use the
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<a href="http://www.mutt.org/" target="_blank" >mutt e-mail client</a>,
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and that never changes. They may add support for some new things, but
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overall it's always the same.</p>
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