Email lets every individual organize themselves

Email clients are very flexible. They have had over 30 years to mature. They have introduced sufficient features to allow for extremely sophisticated workflows. Or, super simple yet powerful setups.

That means that everyone on the team can work and communicate how they wish.

Mailing lists are not fun to use

At our company, and in most companies, communication is not the job. Communication is what makes getting the job possible/faster/better. That means that we should communicate as little as possible while being good at our jobs.

Having a collaboration platform (à la Slack, Teams) which is pretty and fun is counter productive for everyone at the company. People end up communicating more which tends to slow a company down.

We do have real time chat

We do have a chat interface that we use for real-time chat. That chat platform can be more fun to use and is where we will have more light-hearted or urgent discussions. Of course, when things are very urgent we just get on a call.

Collaboration is not about bandwidth it’s about Qbandwidth

In tech there is a lot of talk about signal vs. noise. Yet, it seems that most collaborative tools are always aiming for more communication as if that was the goal. It’s obvious that a lot of information can be more detrimental than useful.

We think that email is a platform which tends to cull high quality communication from people. It entices people to generate complete thoughts explained in paragraphs with full sentences. It also allows people to communicate calmly without worrying about the barrage of new messages coming into a real time chat which might bury the context that they are trying to use for their response.

Web interfaces should be a fallback

The mailing list software we use has a web archive. This archive allows us to reference specific messages using links. It also allows us to give new team members access to all of our previous conversations if they like. This avoids a lot of simple questions for new employees.

Other small advantages

  1. If you have everything in your email, it’s easy to have all the context of your company offline.
  2. It’s super easy to back up all the most important information of your computer

We don’t think it’s a coincidence that email is used in certain settings

Email is used nearly exclusively in certain specific settings.

  1. All the major advances of science since 1995 happened through email collaboration.
  2. Google uses groups.google.com for most of its serious collaboration. They have chat but the messages don’t persist.

We are really late to the mailing list party, what did we use before?

We used GitLab issues to collaborate for about 3 years prior to this move. We were quite happy with GL, what pushed us to look for something different was the very slow and cumbersome search of GL issues. It’s not even possible to search for issues or comments within a certain date window! Not to mention the very slow performance of their managed service.