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.