Email is good.

Of course, just a few days after I blogged about one little feature of Inbox that I really like (reminders, particularly on iOS), it is announced that Inbox will be shut down in March 2019.

I saw a good amount of sadness/frustration of it, but nowhere near the blowback I thought I’d see. No petitions to keep it open or bizarre threats (there probably are some, but none have crossed my path naturally). I wonder if that’s because people care, but not like I’m moving to Canada care about an email client. Nothing like what Google Reader saw. People still talk about that one.

Bad timing for power-user email people, as the also seemingly-beloved Newton is shutting down at the end of September 2019. Part of me wishes I could have gotten to try Newton anyway. With user quotes like: If you’re buried in email and want to get your life back, use Newton, plus the fact they charged 10 bucks a month for it so were strongly incentivized to make it awesome, sounds good to me. Founder Rohit Nadhani straight up said the competition from free apps is just too stiff.

There is even the other Google product, Google Keep, that I hear people quite like and appeals to me in some ways, but I’m not even going to bother to try it since I just don’t trust little things that feel like playground test apps for Google are going to stick around. They won’t.

Inbox (literally Google Inbox) has this built-in concept of Reminders. You can do it from the desktop app:

It saves you the annoyingness of creating a new email, typing in your own email address, choosing a subject line, and all that.

It’s even more awesome on mobile:

I email myself a lot (or the concept of it), and I was really lamenting the loss of Mail To Self, which shut down after they couldn’t comply with GDPR. This has entirely replaced that for me and I think I like it even better.

Yes, this is an obvious and simple thing, but it wasn’t until maybe a month or two when I even bothered to try it. For some reason, I just avoided this feature, always choosing to email myself instead. It’s easy to learn one thing and do it forever, so it feels like to break the mold sometimes and find a new little workflow you like even better.

Sifting through my post-long-weekend Team CSS-Tricks inbox, it reminds me why so many folks have a bad taste in their mouth about email. Your inbox can get so flooded with noise so quickly. By noise, I mean those emails that aren’t junk or spam, but are just so un-important that spending time on them feels like a waste. Here’s a list of ones I was hacking through this morning:

1. Someone just typing gibberish into my form. Happens sometimes on a site about web design. They are probably “testing” the form.
2. Someone wanting to translate an article into Chinese. I generally don’t reply to these as I have a published page about this they can find and I really don’t care what they do.
3. Same thing; Russian.
4. Please add me on Skype so we can talk about something. (No. I think that’s rude to assume I have a bunch of time for you with zero context.)
5. I have this great article for you to publish! (No. It’s written like garbage and full of spam links.)
6. We already translated an article of yours, here’s a link to it. (Uh, OK.)
7. I have amazing opportunities for your site, please respond to me. (No.)
8. More gibberish.
9. Super technical question about image editing. (I have no particular expertise in this area and make clear on the contact form I don’t do personal technical support.)
10. There is a typo in an article of yours. This one is actually quite welcome. It’s my mistake, I’d like to fix it. If it’s sort and sweet and has the URL and where is, awesome. 
11. I have a guest post to pitch. (Yay! Not at all noise!)
12. Killer Infographic for your CBD Content from Vaping 360. (Sigh.)

This is what having an open contact form is like, at least for me. It’s mostly junk. But still, it doesn’t take that much time to deal with, and I like having an open door for legit people to get in touch.

Message from reader Steven Hambleton:

Despite the power and intelligence available to companies like Microsoft and Google, we still have five instances of our image-laden signature staring back at us when we reply to an email conversation.

Why oh why can’t they detect a duplicate and snip it off? We only need it once!

I’m with Steven on this one.

I like having a signature, as it gives me some kind of warm-fuzzy feeling that every bit of email I write does a tiny bit of marketing for me. Mine is a simple reminder of the big projects I work on. But it makes me an offender of signature-creep:

Seems like the kind of thing huge tech companies can solve. For the most part, I never see that stuff, thanks to the […] menu I get in Inbox.

But still, I see it often enough it’s silly and obnoxious. Particularly when the signature is massive. Like this kind of thing:

That would be a cool paid feature for an email client:

We chop off email signatures.

In the article How to Ask a Favor published by the Valet. magazine staff, they say:

1. Be direct with your request
2. Give your reason why
3. Provide an opportunity for escape

Great little framework. If I was to apply it to my publication CSS-Tricks and me reaching out to a potential writer I might say:

Hey person!

Are you interested in writing a guest post for CSS-Tricks? I saw you’ve been working on ________ and it’s extremely cool. 

I’m always looking for great guest posts, and it’s often a win-win-win. You get some publicity and payment, I get content for the site, and our readers will love it.

If you don’t have time or just would rather not for any reason, just ignore me. 

I do like #3. It relaxes the whole thing and it flips something that could be pushy and a turn-off into no big deal.

Email filters seem like a bit of a power-user feature. These are things like “if an email is from this address and contains this text, apply this label and automatically archive it.” It’s pretty cool that we can do that, and I’d wager most clients support some version of that. 

I recently saw this:

True life: ~50-100 of my daily emails are calendar invite related (e.g. 1 invite sent to 75 ppl in my org generates 50-75 replies).

Filtering them has made a HUGE difference (even as an avid keyboard shortcut user). Here is the filter I wrote (w/ skip inbox and apply label):

— Julia Grace (@jewelia) July 20, 2018

That sounds like it saves Julia a lot of grief, which is great. It makes me think though… wouldn’t cutting those emails off at the source be better? Hm. Maybe, maybe not. It boils down to if it’s useful to have those emails in the archive or not. Perhaps it’s useful to be able to search for a person and see when you had meetings with them in the past (or future, I suppose). If that’s not ever useful, then I’d see about getting the calendar you use to stop sending those emails. After all, you wouldn’t fight junk email by setting up a million filters, you unsubscribe from them.

So I suppose… only filter if:

• You have no control over the source of the email, and need to exert some control after it arrives.
• You don’t mind getting the email, but you don’t need to see it. It’s useful in search.
• You like doing fancy workflow things, like automatic labeling or prioritization.

If you’re using filtering to trash stuff, try to cut it off at the head instead.

Hey Chris, just shooting you a text here to let you know I emailed you about that stuff we talk about on the phone. 

It just doesn’t feel right, does it? I’ll admit, sometimes I don’t mind. Like if it’s a real estate agent whom I’ve told I want to be kept very up to date on everything going on. But usually, it’s pretty far up the obnoxious scale.

I don’t want a Direct Message (DM) on Twitter about the email you sent me. I don’t want a phone call about that same email. I don’t need a email about your phone call. I don’t need a Slack message about your text or for you to stop by in person about your phone call.

All these are crossing the communication-type chasm and feel like a violation of trust. We’ve already communicated in one way. There is already proof that I use that communication type. I’m an adult person who has already communicated with you and if there is some breakdown there, there is a reason for it that can’t be solved by jumping chasms.

The primary reason is that my trust in you drops a ton the second you do it. You don’t come across as a go-getter, you come across as needy and desperate, and that’s not a good look on anybody.

"Hi, I haven't received a response to the email I sent ten minutes ago. I'm just calling to offload my panic attack onto you. Thanks."

— Pete Corey (@petecorey) July 17, 2018

You know how I pick which communications of any type I respond to first? Whatever ones I feel like. The ones I think have the most potential and feel good. Make me feel good, not chased.

Not to mention, confusion:

Of course not. There are people like Daniel Jacobs out there:

You don’t deserve my time, Daniel Jacobs. You demonstrated no understanding of me or the site you are asking about. That’s a terrible way to reach out to someone. I’m quite sure you are a real person and this tactic gets you enough leads or whatever that you’re doing just fine.

But I’m not going to talk to you Daniel Jacobs. I know just by the smell of this email you are not a good person for me to work with.