Email is good.

Here’s me! This is my business inbox that really isn’t very busy at all, and it’s very heavily skewed toward… garbage? Perhaps I’m a bit salty there, but I suspect most of us are when we’re getting solicited constantly.

I saw this in r/AssholeDesign: A user in the comments verifies that Yahoo and Gmail do it too. In the case of Gmail, in the promotions tab: I’ve never seen it. Not sure why. Maybe because I pay for Gmail storage or something and that makes me a paid customer and they don’t show them […]

When I think about other people and what their email-at-work situation is like, I imagine them on email threads with their co-workers and responding to requests from their bosses or managers. But I wonder how accurate that is? Is that just some weird manifestation of my mind? I’ve literally never had a professional job like […]

If anyone out there wants to answer those questions, I’d be glad to hear them in any format. But then I have bonus questions for you:

I’ve heard this fact about email in a bunch of places so I’m going to note it here in case it becomes interesting to remember later. In the late 1990s, the world fell in love with email. The world was a little late: Queen Elizabeth II had been sending email for decades. In 1976, just […]

I half-expected my inbox this morning to be full of (disingenuous) Christmas well-wishing marketing blather. But not this year. I imagine it’s partially due to my (pats own back) diligence in unsubscribing to anything I don’t want, but usually that’s not quite enough on big holidays. I usually get awkward Happy Holidays messages from some […]

This is mostly just a note to myself to do what the title says. Clearly quite a few people care about encrypted communication, as they should. There is a big audience for apps like Signal — people that care that their communications are end-to-end encrypted. Email is definitely not end-to-end encrypted… unless you very specifically […]

“Report Spam & Unsubscribe” Gmail, notably, offers this feature. I squirm a little every time I see it. If an email is spam, meaning the sender is a criminal, “unsubscribing” means hitting the criminals servers with a request. Why would a criminal honor that request? In fact, wouldn’t a criminal note this request as “ah […]

Kind of a genius move from Google to get the biggest name in organizing your life to endorse Google file products. It’s really just fluffy nonsense. Set a goal to process emails daily. Yes, sure, OK. Can-do. The rest of it is just showing you basic surface-level features that already exist, like search. Still, it’s […]

Kelly isn’t alone: I take declaring email bankruptcy to mean removing 100% of everything from one’s inbox, status be damned. Unread? Read but not replied to? Doesn’t matter, it’s gone. I’ve rarely hear anyone say it pained them to do it. It’s always liberating or otherwise a good feeling. Hey, I ain’t gonna yuck anyone’s […]