Titan

News from back in August: Automattic Invests $30M in Titan, a Business Email Startup. That’s the kind of news that perks my head up as…

  • I’m kind of a fan of Automattic and the WordPress universe.
  • I, uh, have a blog about email.
  • I think the name Titan is cool
  • Apparently .email is a TLD and now I want one.

https://titan.email/

Titan looks a lot like Front. Front has been husslin’ since 2014 building a “shared inbox” tool. We use Front at CodePen and it’s honestly indispensable, so I’m actually surprised there aren’t more companies trying to replicate and innovate past them. Front has also taken quite a bit of money and apparently used it well, as around a year ago one researcher valued them at 1.3B and that was before at least one other round.

I agree with what Jan-Erik Asplund says there:

But there’s another company that—albeit growing more slowly—may have a much higher ceiling than the intra-team chat app.

Front is like Slack for your email, except instead of creating another distracting, noisy, always-on tool, Front allows users to spin up ephemeral chats within email threads themselves.

Instead of forwarding an email to a colleague or going into Slack to ask them a question that relates to a customer question or request, you can tag them into the thread and have a quick chat right in the context that’s most useful.

Email is just darn useful context. It can be messy, but that’s where technology can come in and be helpful.

Best of luck to both Titan and Front here. Email has been notoriously hard to build actually useful new tooling around, and these companies both seem to be actually doing it.

The Email TODO List

Personally, my inbox is my TODO list. One of them, anyway. I also use Things as my TODO machine. That seems messy, doesn’t it? But it seems to work for me.

The reason is that my TODO list isn’t all email-related things. It could be “buy a gift for my nephew’s birthday” or “make an appointment to get a new driver’s license”. That’s my master list where nearly every important TODO ultimately makes it.

But the emails sitting in my inbox are often essentially TODOs as well. In the form of “edit this article so I can respond with next steps” or “answer this person’s question but also write a draft blog post on it because it was interesting”. Those things are worthy of being on the master TODO list, but they don’t always make it there. Usually, they feel fine sitting in the inbox for a while, because I know I’ll get to them there as well. Moving them feels like unnecessary busy work. It doesn’t always feel messy to me, it feels like a working system.

But sometimes I will yank long-sitting emails off the inbox. I’ll write them up, like the examples above, and plop them into the master list. Sometimes I just feel like hitting “Inbox Zero”, and I know it’s going to take me a little while (days, weeks) to get to that thing and that is too long to sit in an inbox for me. That busy work of moving TODOs from one place to another is exactly what I don’t like about real Inbox Zero.

I don’t mind alternate TODO lists. For me, for now, it’s fine.

Mimestream

It’s been six months since Mailplane threw in the towel, saying Google is going to destroy the ability for users to log in in apps like Mailplane. I keep an eye on this saga a bit as I’m a big Mailplane user. I like having a dedicated app for email, but I actually like the default web experience of Gmail, and I like having separate tabs for separate accounts.

So if Mailplane really were to die, that’d be a little sad for me, but I’d move on and find something else I like. It won’t destroy my email productivity.

I’d probably give Mimestream a real shot. It’s clearly macOS-y in a way that I usually like, and clearly entirely focused on Gmail support (which would be much harder for me to switch away from):

But this isn’t a wrapper around the web experience for Gmail, this is making Gmail more like Apple Mail or Sparkmail. As of yet, I’ve never got into this style of email client, but I’d try it before switching back to using my actual browser for email. Jason Snell was in the same boat as me:

I went through the stages, as you do. I tried to run Gmail in a single-site browser. It didn’t really take. I opened Apple Mail and… nope. It doesn’t work the way I want my email to work, and it’s inconsistent and slow in just too many ways. I’m not going back to that relationship.

If Mimestream can convince a fellow Mac dude who seemingly feels the same way about email as I do, that’s certainly worth something.

Don’t ask to ask, just ask

Nice little single-serving website.

The solution is not to ask to ask, but just to ask. Someone who is idling on the channel and only every now and then glances what’s going on is unlikely to answer to your “asking to ask” question, but your actual problem description may pique their interest and get them to answer.

So, to summarize, don’t ask “Any Java experts around?”, but rather ask “How do I do [problem] with Java and [other relevant info]?”

I think chat and chat-like software has this problem, where email does not.

Email as a write API

I just noticed this feature in Things:

Which reminded me of this feature in WordPress:

Which reminds me it was just this year HEY announced you could blog from your email account:

This post you’re reading right now is the world’s first HEY World post. And I published it by simply emailing this text directly to world@hey.com from my jason@hey.com account. That was it.

We often think of email as something of a read API (e.g. get notifications from services), but it’s awfully cool as a write API as well, sending content and instructions to services.

Smead Podcast 157: Five Email Management Strategies

This is from back in 2017. I just want to make sure I get it logged here as I want to make sure I understand what the general advice for email management is out there in the universe.

Certified Professional Organizer Debbie Rosemont discusses email and how to tackle it before it gets out of control.

  1. Reduce how much email you have coming in. Unsubscribe. The more you send, the more you get.
  2. You can do email intermitantly.
  3. Process email to zero. Processing is different than reading, processing is making a decison, not just reading.

(They don’t get to the last two.)

I don’t dislike any of the tips really, I just find them to be the same ones I’ve read over and over and over. They had precious little time to talk, so fair enough, but I also find they lack the nuance of real productivity. For example, there are different ways to be productive with time spend in your inbox.