Email is good.

I started watching Hacks the other day. Kinda fun show. There was a scene where Ava and her agent are talking and Ava had gotten an email that included a bunch of other emails in a thread and it revealed some detail to Ava she wasn’t supposed to know. Barely important to the plot at all, I just noticed because it was about email and my brain is ridiculous that way. The agent says “Yeah email is tricky”. I couldn’t even tell if it was a joke or a sympathetic quip.

It happened to me the other day. I was emailing back and forth a bunch with a third-party company trying to sort out an issue. Someone included me on what was another related thread about the issue, so I got to see the entire quoted history of that conversion, which seemed like it had some messages in there potentially not meant for my eyes. Nothing earth shaking, but one of them got an OH. Really. response from my brain.

My guess is the person typing my email into a cc or whatever didn’t even think about the thread history. They just wanted me to see a new message they were typing.

It has me thinking… is this obvious? Part of me feels like it is, and part of me feels like it isn’t. Almost like the UI of the email app you use can make it go one way or the other. But it’s also one of those things that if you screw it up badly enough once, that will probably be the last time.

You and I can really like email, but we can’t force anyone else to. Most people don’t, I’m sure you realize, even if in reality it’s providing an extremely valuable communication tool, which they should lean into instead of away from!

But alas.

Extracting value out of email often comes in the form of reaching out to people. Can you help them? Can they help you? Should we communicate more to figure that out? This often begins via email as it’s the main publicly accessible communication medium.

There is usually a power dynamic at play.

Maybe I really really wanna communicate with you because I really really want a certain thing to work out. They probably know that, if they are smart. And if that’s the case, and they don’t particularly love email, you should be more than willing to move to whatever communication method they like. If the power dynamic goes the other way, maybe forcing them onto email is fine.

It’s perhaps the most awkward when the power dynamic is equal. Say it’s a co-worker at the same level as you. You need to work together on something and part of it is requiring some email proficiency. If they throw up the I’m just not good at email flag, which is weirdly more socially and business acceptable than it should be, then you just gotta step up and be the email person. It’s like when you have a group report to do in sixth grade and one kid just doesn’t contribute but nobody seems to care.

I’d like to dig into this more over time.

How do you deal with people that are terrible at email but you kinda need them not to be?

Via https://i-merani.tumblr.com/post/813084813873627136

Details https://www.wired.com/story/artemis-ii-microsoft-outlook-problems/

— drewtoothpaste (@drewtoothpaste.bsky.social) 2026-04-20T13:55:29.313Z

The other day, my beloved Mimestream started hanging and being slow. I’m probably not going to abandon it, but it was an excuse for me to set it aside for a while. I just opened a gmail.com tab in my browser and rolled like that for a while.

It was nice. Honestly, I probably look at my email a little too much. Not a massive productivity problem, but a break felt good and certainly wasn’t going to affect my productivity (might even help it).

Then I downloaded Spark Mail to give that a try. Used it a couple days. Totally fine. In the end, just not my thing. I don’t need meeting notes, calendars, or teams. Didn’t love the look or most of the default settings. Oh well. I could absolutely use it if I had to, but I don’t.

Then I opened up trusty ol’ Apple Mail. I assumed it would just work. My Gmail account is correctly added and activated. I tried to manually sync it. It wouldn’t even try to sync. A few restarts and waiting later I got it to try to sync, but then it would just stop syncing again. I peeked into Little Snitch and saw there was no network activity. Who knows why? Maybe Google was throttling it or something. I wanted to give Apple Mail a couple of weeks of usage just for fun, but nope.

I did prove what I assumed was true, though. I don’t really care what email client I use. The client isn’t what provides the productivity; it’s the habits.

“Free your newsletters from the inbox”, Meco says.

I tend to agree. I keep my content consumption stuff out of my email inbox. I do that through Feedbin as it makes the most sense to me to combine that with RSS. But if you’re not an RSS type, I can see this being useful.

Looks like you “hook up” your email address to it, and it yanks the newsletters out of it. That scares me, personally, especially since this thing looks very vibe-coded. But them giving you an email to send the newsletters to is smart.

Maybe the smart move for them is to do the “hooking up”, but have it crawl through the last year or so of email and auto-subscribe to those newsletters in Meco and UNsubscribe from them in your regular email.

The daily audio roundup from all your newsletters is pretty neat, too. I find AI voices grating for now, but maybe if the content were entirely based on stuff I know I subscribed to on purpose, I would find it more palatable.

Rands, in I Hate Fish, says he’s conquered email after struggling with it for a long time:

Are you still struggling with your email inbox? I’m not. It’s been years.

Which basically boils down to two rules:

1. All irrelevant emails are addressed immediately.
2. All relevant emails are acted on. Without fail.

It’s always elbow grease that gets it done in the end.

Your job is to push through the work. To find the essential work that creates the most value. For every action that creates an additional signal in your to-do list, there must be an opposite reaction that removes something else. Your most valuable asset at work is your time.

Or maybe just do it automatically?

Yep, that’s my take.

Why?

1. It gives you instant verification that form actually worked. A random form on a website might just be broken. Wired up to a service that don’t work anymore. Back end code that’s busted. API limits exceeded. Who knows. If you get a copy of what you typed into that form via email immediately, it probably also properly sent to who is supposed to be getting it.
2. When someone responds, it might not include your complete message in the reply. People can do whatever they want with an email reply including alter or remove the original message. Might be nice to have your original copy (assuming that goes unaltered).

My alma mater Wufoo made it a choice of the person making the form.

The default was to not do that, which I understand. Even though I’m a fan, it also feels like that’s the wrong choice for a default. It’s also interesting to think about if it should be the choice of the user or not. This Wufoo example either did it or it didn’t, the user didn’t have any say, and there was no way to make it a user choice. I’ve seen forms where it’s explicitly a user choice. I do like user choice, but it’s also making people think about one more thing which has downsides.

All things considered, I think web forms should:

1. Tell you they are going to send you a confirmation immediately and
2. Do that

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.