Email is good.

Looks like Jessica Hische moved her client email builder tool thingy from her site over to Studioworks. Makes sense! They are building out a little section of tools over there to help creatives, and this fits in nicely. Probably a nice little traffic-driver, which is one of my favorite little SaaS tricks.

The point of this particular tool is that there is sometimes language that is tricky to get right when dealing with people and projects you care about, but that may not have much or any money.

For example, a “Very Low” budget for a “Nonprofit” generates…

Dear __________,

Thanks for thinking of me for this project and for reaching out. As I am a professional artist, not a hobbyist, and as your company, while a nonprofit, still has an operating budget, I should be compensated appropriately for work performed. I am happy to work with smaller budgets for nonprofits, but I, and many other creatives, feel strongly about adhering to industry pricing standards so that it’s possible to make a living as a creative professional. Fair pay is important and asking artists to create very low paying work for a company operating as a nonprofit (see charity/nonprofit distinction below), even if that work goes unused, shows that our time is not valued. We have bills to pay and families to support like everyone else.

Independent artists operate very differently than agencies. We don’t have the time and resources to throw at low and no-budget work and generally reserve our pro-bono projects for true charity work or personal projects. If you are wondering how I differentiate a “nonprofit” from a “charity”, I generally ask myself “Is everyone volunteering or just me?”. Non-profits run the gamut from tiny volunteer-only collectives to huge organizations with multi-million dollar operating budgets. Ask yourself which end of the spectrum your organization is on. If it’s the former, please let me know because I love volunteer work for the right cause. If it’s the latter — I know you understand the value of good design, but perhaps the folks in charge of the annual budget don’t. Help us all out and set up a meeting with them to establish a budget for freelance design work moving forward.

Please feel free to reach out in the future if there is another project you think I would be a good fit for and there is more favorable compensation.

All the best,

___________

Nicely said, right? It’s so well said that I think most of us would be comfortable sending that. If it works out, the stage will be set properly, and if it doesn’t work out, you did the job of educating whoever read it.

You can always change your email address. Just make a new one and forward the old one to the new one (for a while).

But when you’re using a service for email, you’re at their whim on what they allow. Gmail will certainly allow you to make a new one and foward the old one to the new one, but wouldn’t it be nice if it wasn’t an entirely new account so you could retain archived emails? Just pointing out that as of last Christmas, you can change your Gmail address now, and retain everything.

I haven’t looked into if you can go to an @gmail.com address to a custom email address yet, but that’s the one I’d be tempted by. I’ve been using my chris@coyier.com email through Fastmail, and I like it, but I haven’t had the guts to entirely forward chriscoyier@gmail.com to it, which I’ve used for like 20 years. If I could just change my email to that, it would be a lot more tempting.

It’s:

The Forwardable Email: A way to help others actually make that connection they said they would

They explain it in more detail on the site, but the gist is that if someone tells you they’ll connect you with somebody that is very appealing to you to be connected with, don’t just follow up with like “hey yo, are going to do that thing you said you were going to do?” Instead, write an email that is just the right amount of useful that that connector person can just hit forward, add a few lines, and be done with it.

Hi Corey,

It was great to catch up with you yesterday. Thanks for your advice on…[what we talked about].

As discussed, I would love to take you up on your offer to connect me to [Connection Name]. I am very interested in talking with them about…[reason why you want to connect with them]. 

For their context, I am… [brief headline of who you are and what you do.] See more below. 

Thanks,

Your Name

[Add any additional details, descriptions, links, or decks below the signature, if necessary and relevant.]

I’ve said this too many times but I won’t stop now. An HTML can be quite tastefully done by just doing a few things to improve the situation beyond a pure text email:

• A pleasant readable typeface
• Reasonable line length
• Breathable line height
• Anchor links on words
• Dark/light mode

No fancy layout or images or whatever, just better text. Maybe a style for buttons since they make for such clear “calls to action”.

I feel like this “Email Editor” does a pretty good job of keeping it that simple and providing a visual builder.

I get the feeling that it’s pretty old. The padding controls don’t work anymore as it looks like they apply the padding to the wrong elements.

Or maybe it was just vibe coded up and slapped out there? I dunno. I still like the idea and it makes me wanna build my own someday.

That’s what Resurf is, if you trust them to do it!

It doesn’t have to be yourself, it can be whoever:

Personally, I have reasonable doubts WordPress can truly offer a 100 years of hosting, but I think I trust it more than one guy’s side project.

I gave them a buck to send a message in a year (literally the screenshot above, lol). I’ll let you know if it arrives.

Just a little appreciation for the work that most email providers put into filtering spam from our inboxes. I feels like it stopped working for a few hours this weekend on my Gmail account and maybe 20-30 slipped through for me. Not a big deal, cleaned up, and it’s all back to normal.

But I’ve known several people, my mom for one and a co-worker for another, who have had email setups where it was just like this, or worse, all the time. Whatever system they had in place just wasn’t capturing spam (or wasn’t capturing enough of the spam) so that it was a regular task for them manually clearing it out.

That’s really just not feasible. That’s taking up super valuable brain time. You are going to resent email and not have it be an effective tool for you if the work you do in your inbox is just janitorial.

My main experience is with Gmail, and despite the hiccup this weekend, it’s amazing at this job. In perusing my spam folder, I get ~100 a day. I know I would feel entirely different about email if it was my job to clear those every day.

What’s everyone else’s spam situation like? Totally handled? Few slip in each day? Are you clearing dozens or hundreds a day by hand?

I feel like I can’t let this blog exist without mentioned the existence of Strong Bad. He’s this old-internet comedy series character (part of the Homestar Runner series) who’s bits included reading the email he gets from viewers. From Wikipedia:

n 2021, Polygon declared Strong Bad an icon. In a tribute, they note that “Strong Bad Email was far and away the most popular segment on Homestar Runner”

He recently had a new one, which is amazing since it’s like 25 years old.

Agree with Andy Baio:

I love that they’re still making these in Flash, played with the Ruffle emulator

If you ever make fun of people’s grammar in emails as you read them, it might be a thing you do that got stuck in your brain after watching Strong Bad do it in your formative years.

Just got two emails that I thought were quite nice. It reminds me of an opinion I’ve really held strong for quite a while. I even made a template for it one time, and I wrote:

if we go for HTML email, we can apply just enough layout and styles to make it almost like a plain text email, only with a bit more class.

• A pleasant readable typeface
• Reasonable line length
• Breathable line height
• Anchor links on words
• Dark/light mode

Here’s one from Cursor:

I find a “button” style could be added to that short list of OK things in an otherwise chill HTML email. But I really like how short and sweet the email is. Begs to be actually read.

And one from Mandy Brown:

Probably the nicest typography of any newsletter ever. But really isn’t doing that much to pull it off, just a nice typeface with smart setting.

Nic Chan:

A “fuck off contact page” is what a company throws together when they actually don’t want anyone to contact them at all. They are usually found on the websites of million or billion dollar companies, likely Software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies that are trying to reduce the amount of money they spend on support by carefully hiding the real support channels behind login walls.

I love the image. Says it’s all.

I can’t imagine a company that is run in such a way there isn’t even an email for reaching them.

Gina Trapani:

I like to keep my email inbox clear and deal with messages as they come in, and archive or delete them when I’m done. But I’d fallen deeply behind on my personal email inbox a few years ago and never dug myself out.

Realizing I had almost 4,000 unprocessed threads, I considered declaring email bankruptcy and moving on. But I wanted to build up my muscle of handling incoming messages each day, to unsubscribe from newsletters and marketing I didn’t want, and to build a list of people I want to be in touch with—and who I’ve ignored for far too long.

YES.

I think the best way to get on top of your email is to put in the work and get on top of your email. Chipping away at it, doing the things you need to do along the way so that it doesn’t get so bad again, is the job. Motivating yourself by tracking progress, as Gina has done here with a home-brewed app, is awesome.