Email is infuriating until you realise it's just paper that can teleport. Your messages are paper, each reply is paper, threads are just piles of paper, with all the same strengths and weaknesses of letters written on paper.
Which makes it immediately clear why email is so bad at being a group chat.
Where Email Works
For 1:1 conversations, email is pretty good. Similar to how me and my friend April sending letters to each other is pretty good. Lets assume April and I keep copies of the letters we send each other for future reference, and now all of the following holds up:
- all participants know the full and consistent conversation history
- we can read the conversation in chronological order and everything makes sense
- I can send attachments like photos and we both have copies of them
- we could start multiple conversations in parallel based on subject
- it has the potential to be confusing if we aren't strict about discussing specific subjects in specific threads
- if April and I both send messages at the same time, its straightforward to figure out that both of our messages were written without the context of the other based on timestamps and content
The Cracks Form
Me and April are very happy with a 6 month long chain discussing Lego Star Wars The Complete Saga when I realise my friend Ben might have something to add. Email offers two ways to add Ben to the conversation, a) reply to the existing thread and add Ben as recipient or b) forward the latest message to Ben. Both of these have pros and cons but both lead to the same core problem.
Neither option actually sends Ben 6 months of emails, both send Ben 1 email. But fear not, my email client of choice injects a quote of the message it is a reply to, and April's client does the same thing, so the message Ben gets will contain 6 months worth of nested quoted emails which he can read in reverse order to catch up to the conversation. This is an annoying in format, but the bigger problem is that it's fragile.
The quoted section is just a convention1 that every email client does it slightly differently. It's exposed in the email editor UI so I could alter the quoted text23 while Ben would be none the wiser. If I deleted the quoted text in an email to April 3 weeks ago4, April and I are unlikely to notice since we both have the original copies but that would break the nested quoting chain for all future emails and Ben would not see any messages before that deletion. He wouldn't even know there were any older than 3 weeks.
This problem is more or less exactly the same problems you would run into on paper. April and I send letters for 6 months, I want to get Ben's thoughts so I need to send him a copy of every letter April and I have sent on the subject. I could alter the emails and Ben wouldn't know, or I could send him a subset of the chain and he wouldn't know. He just has to trust that I'm sharing everything he needs. The only difference is email clients add quotes automatically-ish, which automates me walking around my house finding all the letters in the thread and making photocopies.
Then Ben writes his reply, and sends a copy to me and and to April, hopefully using the same subject line so we know it's related to our existing thread. We continue on, all future messages contain all 3 of us as recipients and we continue our discussion.
Adding Ben to the chain worked, but there were several places context could have been lost and would be invisible to Ben:
- if the quote history was removed anywhere in the previous messages
- if quote history was tampered with Ben will be missing the original copy
- attachments from earlier in the chain may not be preserved in Ben's copy
- if I forward email X in the chain to Ben, then April sends me message Y in the chain, then Ben sends his reply Z, Ben will miss message Y from April
- if subject names were not preserved well enough our email clients may not recognise that new messages were part of existing threads8
- if a second email thread is started, we need to remember that Ben is involved now
- if the conversation history forks (2 messages both reply to the same parent message), the email quoting section going forward may be missing that other branch of messages
- if someone presses Reply instead of Reply All, someone is going to miss a message
In a 1:1 conversation these aren't issues, and a 3 person chain is doable, but each additional participant increases the surface area for something to go wrong.
It Breaks
In professional settings, email chains get ridiculous. Even if your company does all of its internal communications through Slack et al., email is needed to talk to other organisations. In my work I often get forwarded an email thread that started 9 months ago, across 3 organisations with dozens participants, with broken quoting history, that later turns out to be 1 of the 4 threads on the project, each containing a different subset of recipients. The chance that I am missing context asymptotically approaches 100%.
Whenever this would happen I would tear my hair out trying to understand who said what to who and where. Have you ever tried to reconstruct the timeline of 2 parallel email chains you've been forwarded?5 I don't recommend it.
This is a diagram of all of the emails for a particular project at work involving 3 companies and 28 participants. Note that this is just the messages I am privy to, there are many more that I cannot see because the email chain quoting broke months before I was added to any of the threads. Also note that empty circles are messages that I only have access to via unspooling quote sections, they were not actually sent to me.
Half the messages in the chain were never sent to me! Until I made this visualisation I had no clue how complex this was, all I knew is that as a user I was struggling to comprehend it.
I thought there was some true understanding that I was missing. How can the whole world run on this system where I have to read quoted threads backwards, ignore bloated email signatures and mangled quotes? There must be a system behind this that I'm just not getting.
But no. There is no system.6
It's just paper
Of course paper than can teleport doesn't work as a group chat. How could it! How could you expect it to. Anyone can address any piece of paper to anyone, anyone can quote or not quote the context, anyone can alter the context it contains. Imagine the diagram above but it was done with paper. Ensuring 28 people are all receiving the right context with sheets of paper would be immensely messy. It's actually insane that it works as well as it does.
The email ecosystem is a great example of building the plane in midair, where attachments are bolted on as inline text, CC is actually the same as TO7, forwarding is guaranteed to mangle whatever thread it contains, quoting is an informal convention1 which every client does differently. The mechanics of who is privy to what messages are just as complex and inscrutable to end users as the rest of the email ecosystem is to end users. It's just paper. It's just paper. It's just paper.
If you treat email like a group chat you will never be happy. But I'm not going to let that stop me.