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With the maturation of SMS and instant messaging platforms such as Slack, Google Chat or Microsoft Teams, people have adapted and continue to adapt to email. use of mail. Given that messaging platforms also continue to improve, what does the communication landscape look like today?
Let's look at instant messaging first. Teams and Chat are built into Microsoft 365 and Google Suite, respectively, while Slack remains firmly rooted. Therefore, the vast majority of corporate or government users have an easy way to send an instant message to their colleagues, as well as colleagues in other organizations. Quick messages, sometimes not directly related to work, live in instant messages. It really helped clear out a lot of mailboxes.
Email is used for communications that are considered most "important" within and outside the organization itself. In fact, many still rightly believe that e-mail The "search" function of instant messaging platforms is significantly inferior to similar functions of their counterparts. Similarly, there is no good way to organize individual messages into folders.
But the nasty texting behavior still exists. Chief among them is the excessive use of the copy (cc) function. Fortunately, instant messaging doesn't have this feature, although it's possible to abuse a channel or team and unnecessarily include people who don't need to be in the conversation.
The more annoying practice of duplicating itself is also ever-present. Again, unlike instant messaging, this drawback is limited to e-mail. In the days before modern email systems, CC by itself might have been useful. But nowadays, copying yourself is part of the "you became your parent" advertisement.
But there is an exception, which is mostly harmless, but sometimes also a "statement" that everything is not as it seems. With a shared mailbox used by a group of people, a group CC is almost mandatory so that everyone in the group can see all replies. Otherwise, outgoing group messages are visible only to the original sender. A common example is for a public account mailbox such as [email protected]. Three or four accountants monitor this mailbox, and they all send replies from this address. The only way to see all responses is if [email protected] has a copy.
However, this sometimes happens when a shared mailbox is used for people who don't actually exist. This could be a former employee or even someone who never existed, such as [email protected]. Unwilling to admit that Joe doesn't really exist, the shared mailbox is monitored by employees pretending to be Joe.
And of course there's the dreaded "reply all" "please stop replying all" response that can go on for days. Fortunately, this feature has no equivalent in the instant messaging world.
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John Agsalud is an IT expert with over 25 years of information technology experience in Hawaii and around the world. He can be reached at [email protected].
