Email alternatives?
 

I am so tired of emails. I seem buried in them, and I know I am far from alone. Since I travel a lot remote communication is essential though. Do people use alternatives like Slack? Curious as to what experiences people have. I obviously can't control everyone but I get a fair amount of email from people who work for me. Has anyone "banned" email or switched to Slack or some messaging app? Any suggestions, it has to have a mobile app for when I am traveling, preferably iOS and Android. Thanks.

We are switching to Salesforce Chatter platform which will cut down on emails and allow people to opt in / out of conversations among other things.

If you're the only one refusing emails won't that be quite a burden on your staff? Slack looks like a neat product if you can get everyone to shift to it for team chat.

We've used Chatter for years and I've seen absolutely no reduction in email usage, whatsoever, in any way shape or form. I get as much email as ever and even more because I get all the Chatter crap.

If you think Chatter is going to save you, you might end up sorely disappointed.

Regards

It certainly is an issue I am concerned about. With anything like this, Basecamp for instance, we try it on a few people and see how it works and then if it seems useful and not too burdensome expand it. We have 3 people in addition to myself on Slack as of today. We will see how it goes. Still happy for any other suggestions. Thanks.

thanks for sharing... my team also has the same concern but i believe from talking to other companies using it part of the reason starts at the top.. if people shift to using chatter as a platform instead of email the behavior will permeate down... hoping to leave emails for more formal communications... now so many thank you messages that are useless... anyway we go live Q1 2015 so let's see.

Email alternatives?
 

Hip chat is what we use. I have a love hate relationship with this kind of collab tool but it integrates well with zen desk etc. so our devs love it.

I have never understood this complaint. Written communication is written communication. Someone, such as what I am doing here, types a message and then sends it. What difference how you read it? It still must appear on a screen somehow.

We use Yammer. It's definitely a cultural shift. Some teams see it as simply another inbox to check, but other teams are actually really good to moving non time sensitive, collaborative discussions and announcements over to Yammer instead of email. I work for a global company so the shift to Yammer certain types of discussions has increased collaboration from a much larger geographically dispersed audience so there's actually some interesting perspectives and conversations that get started that wouldn't have happened inside of email.

we use Slack a lot. It ensures deliverability and helps us collaborate, but isn't really taking the place of email. We find it indispensable though...and yet we still use email.

I've been aggressively unsubscribing which is helpful. Lots lower volume this way.

Also I use Sanebox. That creates a high priority email experience, putting all the rest in a separate folder for later.

Together these seem to make email quite manageable for me.

Charter will do no such thing. It's just Salesforce's pathetic attempt to create buzz in their product. It typically means more email and after a while nobody looks at the stuff. You also get some people inside of the organization who will communicate more than normal through Chatter to try to further their careers by appearing to be 'on it' but in the process waste people's time.

To the OP, messaging is not a good solution to email. True messaging requires that both parties be online. If you have another solution that does offline messaging, then you're pretty much treating messaging as if it is email. There's no real difference.

Get your people clued in on better email etiquette and learn the search function in your software and things will be much easier.

What about Whatsapp? You could create groups or broadcast messages. And you can mute different groups for hours, days, weeks.

I have mixed feelings about tying this and this is part of the reason. The idea in my mind at least is to segregate some of the things like back and forth short communication to clean up the inbox somewhat and isolate a subset of communications, perhaps in a more sensible format than a single inbox.

Thanks. Sanebox looks interesting. I may give it a look. I have already subscribed to AwayFind which notifies you of email from certain people, domains, etc. and use it now on my phones home page rather than email.


In many cases people are online at the same time. Most cases perhaps. Email etiquette is important and probably part of a solution. I do know how to do searches, that isn't an issue. It's things like the 8 emails from one person of a line or two each for some small decision I am trying to keep out of my inbox.

Another solution I have read is to just ban email within the group. I would like to try the messaging first, with some groups.

I had to take a week off one day, and write a large number of filters. This was server-side, which may not work for everyone, but the one time investment with minimal upkeep was worth it. Since it's server side, the email client used matters less, other than be sure it can get into any folders you need it to. Some client/server combinations can only get to the main inbox. I had been burned in the past by client side email filtering on a low speed link -- it would pull down the email, filter it, and put it back. Took too long.

If you've ever read "Dune" by Frank Hebert, he wrote a calming stanza for some of the characters in the book. A few years ago I took liberties and rewrote it:
(Above: read sieve as 'filter'. Sieve is the name of an instance of email filtering. The original can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bene_G...y_against_fear)