How #email should work: Send a colleague a downloadable csv file.
How my email now works since switching to #MicrosoftExchange:
- Colleague sends email with file
- Mail is send to quarantine
- 2hrs later I'm told "we stopped this spam"
- I release email from quarantine
- I click on .csv file link
- This opens Microsoft secure log-in portal
- I wait for log-in code sent via email
- Excel opens in browser
- Excel downloads file as .xlsx
- I manually open file on PC
- I re-export file as csv
@ExoHugh if microsoft manages to kill sharing files by email, though, that might count as a positive.
But we need convenient alternatives.
@tshirtman Why would you want that killed? I mean, yeah, people need to be better educated about the risks, but it's very useful for many use cases.
@tshirtman Yes, it's terrible for active collaboration within files, but there are plenty of use cases where none of those downsides matter.
Attaching calendar invite link files would be the most obvious example where it works well.
Another would be that it's especially effective for isolated file-transactions that exist outside of a long-term relationship.
Also, while you're right that other methods are more efficient from the technical server-client perspective, email is usually far more efficient from the UX perspective, even today.
Calling for its abolition is like trying to abolish wrenches because some people erroneously use them like hammers.
@LouisIngenthron i agree people use it because it's convenient enough, but mostly because no better alternative emerged, despite all the flaws of this one, it's just too easy (as everyone has an email), someone better will need to be even easier, but if Email become harder, it might help alternatives emerge.
@tshirtman I'm of the very strong opinion that that's not a valid justification for increasing user friction. If a better standard is to emerge, it needs to do so by *being better* not by hobbling its competitors.
@LouisIngenthron you might want to re read my initial message, i have no power or desire to increase email friction, if that happens, it might have positive effects, as i do believe we need to move on from that method.
@tshirtman You said "if Email become harder, it might help alternatives emerge".
@LouisIngenthron it's very inefficient, files get duplicated everywhere (same and different versions), you cannot clean up efficiently without also losing the associated messages, any non ASCII file gets reencoded to base64, inflating its size significantly, it's not a convenient place to store, search, process of do anything with files. It's only used there because email is the lowest common denominator that everything manages to operate with, despite is standardization being terrible.