Email Culture

[moonunions]

i haven't actually emailed someone for pleasure in such a long time the last person i reached out to was a dentist to ask if they take my insurance hahaha. guess we all need to get that penpal thread started again (wherever it is on the forum, i forgor) and try to be the first ones to reach out!

[Slix]

I haven't sent emails back and forth too often in recent years, but some of my family (especially my family who lives overseas) prefer to use email for communicating with some of us back home, so I send a few here and there. I've saved all my old emails from when emailing was super common still, in the mid-to-late 2000s, so occasionally I go back and read some of those and remember the excitement of opening an email from a friend I didn't get to see too often.

[Eunice]

I don't like email, it makes me anxious. At least with snail mail there's a decent interval between letters. With email I don't know if I should reply straight away, and run the risk of the other person also replying quickly, then having to reply at the speed of light again. You get the idea. It just ties me up in knots. So no, I don't do email letters.

[nihil0]

I think the last time I casually emailed someone was back in like... 2020? Because the site we were using to DM was overly image-compressing.

Plus I'm pretty sure it was their dad's email so it wasn't even theirs

A separate email for my webmastering shenanigans and webring apps is listed on my index page, I hope someone uses it to reach out at some point! I love talking but the guestbook doesn't really seem fitting for full conversations.

I'd email more people but I think my phone anxiety like extends to email, which is stupid.

[xwindows]

• My preferred channel for sending e-stuff to/from extended member of my family who I don't meet face to face often, is email. (1)
• My preferred contact channel I give to random stranger, both in real life and online, is email.
• On my personal website, the only point of contact given is email.
• On some of my software projects, the only point of "support" available (read: reporting bugs, requesting feature, asking question) is email.
• I'm okay with using email when participating with other Free software projects; whether for reporting bugs, discussing features, user-to-user support, or even for submitting my modifications.

I have separate email accounts I use for official and personal stuff (now commercially-hosted with my personal website), which are not the same as ones I use under pseudonym.

Nowadays, I also take advantage of normies' perception of email as a "dated" communication method, combined with the fact that it needs conscious effort to write; by using email as a basic "normie filter" to weed out low-quality unsolicited interactions. (2)

But if you meant to ask what condition I would send an email to a rando on the web? I sometimes do so in order to comment on specific writings (including informing the webmaster of some obvious site error) if there was no comment section, the comment section was dysfunctional (3), or when the author preferred comment by email. (4)

I had also done long technical correspondence with people on the Internet sometimes in the past; but chances to do that have been quite few and far between. Otherwise, I don't randomly email people unless I do actually want to ask, suggest, or discuss something generally.

Regardless, just use email, it's universal; especially when it is for purposeful communication.


(1) For just conversation, it would be phone. And for immediate family member, talking face-to-face takes priority for conversation if physically present; otherwise it's going to be phone; and for e-stuffs, that would be either sneakernet or LAN transfer if physically present (to avoid leaking information to 3rd party)-- email is only used as fallback in this category.

(2) I'd rather appreciate high-quality interaction, solicited or unsolicited notwithstanding.

(3) I disable client-side script in my browser; so this is quite a common occurrence.

(4) Some sites like lowtechmagazine.com and manuelmoreale.com, for example, only accept comments by email.

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

@xwindows while I also prefer the medium for its qualities, I dislike the idea of using a technical mean to "filter out" social relations. The idea that technical skills (using E-Mail) correlates with any other human quality (that make them a good partner for exchange) is - in my opinion - a vital error. Many of dear, deep relations wouldn't exist for me if I'd used the recommendation of the E-Mail-Fence-Site you linked. To me, this seems like a form of uncalled for elitism.

[GlitchyZorua]

Email culture is weird...

I have a disposible email address,  which it's signed up to a bunch of obscure guestbooks, spam lists, ets cetera, and its filled with things that I was not expecting!

It was kinda a war mine to watch all of the conversations go down in that disposable email address. I got some average scams, shitposts in my email, and Trolls. Like legit, there are trolls who mass-send a bunch of other emails, thus creating a mess.

It gets more interesting then that, because now there were scammers arguing with the trolls; For whatever reason, they click reply-all instead of just reply, so uh, yeah we get to see the entire conversation go down.

It was fun to watch it go down, I will say that!

But it goes to show how chaotic emailing can be, especially when you let random people get access to your email! 

[PossiblyAxolotl]

Personally I love email, it has a sort of "professional" connotation in the modern day which is why I love to casually bring up my email address and tell people to just send me whatever. I don't get a lot, but sometimes I get a few funny ones and I had a kid who likes my videos email me once and that was really wholesome to see :)

Speaking of... feel free to send me whatever: me@possiblyaxolotl.com or webmaster@i-eat.rocks

This has me thinking of some sort of random email service thing, I'm not sure exactly how it would work but I'm thinking something like people would opt in to receive emails and then when you put an email into the system it's sent to a random user in the list...

[candycanearter07]

But it goes to show how chaotic emailing can be, especially when you let random people get access to your email! 

One of my favorite youtubers, Atomic Shrimp, has a whole series about messing with email scammers :D It can definitely be entertaining!

[ayn_sweeet]

I miss when email culture was actually a thing. It was so nice to email ppl. Now there's texting etc but no more emailing and it sucks. 

Still waiting for the day someone asks me "what's your email?" instead of "what's your snap?" lol

[_ghost_]

I wasn't online back when email was a standard method of communication, so I associate it almost entirely with school and work... I really like the idea of writing more casual emails, but I just don't have people to contact that way. I've gotten a handful of emails over the past few months, but that's it.

I know that I should try to do better about reaching out to people myself, because obviously no one else is going to do it, but it's very hard.

[ABlueRose]

I used to have some penpals growing up, and a few of us switched to email. Unfortunately we grew apart, but I do miss how fun it was to email back and forth.

I've started to try and send emails to people online, but I've only done it a couple times. This reminds me that I need to do that more! It's nice telling people I like their website

[azalea]

man, aside from like... work reasons, i don't really give much thought to email as a communication medium. it's crazy because we have all other sorts of other communication platforms at our disposal - discord, forums, texting... but emailing just seems like such an archaic form of communication that it's treated moreso for important updates only and that's it x.x

i don't think that's going to change for me anytime soon, for better or worse, haha. it's just what it is. the people who i interact with don't really casually email and i completely understand why.

[SadOldMan]

Speaking of that, @ThunderPerfectWitchcraft, I received your last mail, thanks.

I am looking for new penpals, so, "hello world", if you're interested in :

- industrial music
- dungeon synth, dark ambient, neofolk, gothic rock and so on
- field recordings
- J.G Ballard, Borgès, Stephen King,
- rural photography, ruins and old places, architecture, ...
- (C)RPG and interactive fiction + retro video gaming
- cinema (New Hollywood, 80's and 90's classics, horror movies)
- manic archiving of the past
- and much more

... just send a DM and let's exchange mails 

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

... just send a DM and let's exchange mails 

I can very much recommend this ;).