Email is good.

Kids be like:

Email everyone in the world and ask them for a dollar.

To their AI agent.

I wonder how any AI agents got/read this email and what they did with it.

Back from “break”, my inbox is pretty clean (because I’m the unhealthy type that keeps it clean at all times, weekends, holidays, and vacations be damned). But anything that needs a bit of effort tends to hang until I’m at my desk. Here’s what’s left and what I did.

• A guy with a question about a banjo I’m trying to sell. (Answered right away!)
• A guy who sent me a guest blog post draft for feedback. (Needs a bit of time; will answer when I have a short block of time to focus on it.)
• A guy writing in to tell me about a bug on a very old ShopTalk episode. (Took a few hours to fix it. Waited to email back until it was. Otherwise I would have emailed saying thanks and will email again when fixed, which would give me some days.)
• The library is reminding me that some books are coming up due (Thanks! I’ll gather those up and chuck them in my truck so I can’t forget to do it.)
• “Welcome to 3rd Grade!” email from Ruby’s school. (Cool, got it. Nothing majorly actionable, just wanted to make sure I read it closesly)
• An outreach email from a company that sells podcast advertising. They keep pushing for a meeting. (No meeting, please. They have proven zero value yet. It’s unclear whether they can do what I want them to do. This needs to be clearly demonstrated before I’m cutting up my day with a meeting.)
• A pitch containing several ideas for guest blog posts (They look good, said so right away.)
• A reminder about an upcoming renewal for a professional service. (Ugh, it’s soooo expensive. I want to find an alternative, but last time I canceled, I regretted it and went back. Now I’m snakebitten and need to be extra sure if I cancel it. Have three weeks to figure it out.)

when i reply to your email it will either be within ten minutes or within six years

— Cabel Sasser (@cabel.panic.com) 2026-08-20T02:43:53.753Z

I’m like within 30 min or 6 days.

I like that email is async, and some delay is actually desirable. But if it’s been over a week, I think that’s too slow.

That said, I do love digging up an email from many many years ago and replying just for kicks.

David Bushell, after battling with a contact form for years, just said screw it and now just publishes an email address on his contact page.

Kind of a zero-tech solution to allow someone visiting a webpage to send a message. Just… use the thing you already know how to use.

I like it honestly.

Are contact forms just outdated in general? Everyone seems to embed a Calendly widget these days. That’s not my style. I like the tiny bit of additional friction required to send an email. If someone can’t be bothered their message probably wasn’t serious. I’m not looking to maximise meaningless engagement.

Contact forms generally just generate an email anyway.

So why do people use forms instead?

Wellllllllll. There are kinda lots of reasons.

The cheif among them is that a form isn’t just a textarea, it can have dropdowns and checkboxes and stuff that structure a response. But besides that…

• It’s a UX thing. People might have something in mind right this second. If they can just type it in a box quick and hit the button, they might be more apt to do that than hand-crafting an email elsewhere.
• The form might embed extra information. For example, a customer support form might look like an email (just type something into a box), but behind the scenes it might be recording your UserID, browser/platform/version, referrrer, or who knows what else along with it to give extra context to the request.
• The form might submit to a database first, allowing the data to be stored/analyzed in other ways.
• The form might submit to a server which also processes the data in other ways, like routing it to different emails, sending notifications to other services, etc.

But the contact form on your personal website? Maybe it doesn’t need to be there at all.

Reader Tyler Mercer writes in with a link to a nice essay from Terry Godier about the underlying systems of the internet.

The reason your mee-maw and your bank and your boss can all reach you at the same email address is that the protocol that made it possible was published more than forty years ago, and the people who published it did not successfully capture it inside of one company.

There is a lot of different reasons I like email, and I admit “the protocol” isn’t one I generally trot out as one of them. But in terms of importance, it’s near the top. If some new amazing communication tool came along that nailed the UI and UX above and beyond email, if it wasn’t built on open protocols supported widely, it’s not going to unseat email. This has been done over and over. Slack is touted as the great email replacement, and acts as that for many people. Until you lose that job, then it’s useless. Until you don’t like what that company is doing you either have to swallow your morals or be left out. Until Slack goes out of business. Replace “Slack” with “whatever other thing you think is better than email”.

I remember folks who thought Twitter DMs were a nail in the coffin of email. Lolz.

What I don’t really know is if anyone is working on a replacement open protocol (or evolution) of the emails ones (SMTP, IMAP, POP3, DMARC, etc).

JMAP looks decent?

Article from Dan Mercer that’s an obvious must-link from this blog. His opener sets the stage:

In her book Attention Span, UC Irvine informatics professor Gloria Mark describes a study in which her team shut off email for a group of office workers for a week, then compared their behavior to the previous three weeks. The participants experienced notable benefits, including lower stress (as measured by heart rate) and reduced task switching. They also reported a sense of freedom and a healthier pace to their work.

But the big idea is that it only worked because they all did it. If just one of them did it, they’d be left out/behind instead of getting the benefits.

It them quotes/jumps to a major conclusion:

Email is a much bigger problem that needs to be tackled at the organizational and even societal level.

I need to read the book and understand more, because there are just glaring obvious limits to this. If you took these office workers and sealed them into isolated caves where they cannot communicate with anyone about anything, do you think they would still “have a healthier pace to their work”? If healthier is “doing nothing” then sure. Or if their job is staring at the wall or collecting pebbles.

My point is that people need to communicate to work on a team. Maybe email isn’t right for that, or an unnecessary add-on or something. That’s worth exploring. But if you take away the email, it seems like they just need to communicate in other ways. So what are those ways? And are those ways the ways that seems inherently healthier? Why? Is a red “unread” badge on Slack massively different than a read “unread” badge in an email client?

Just to throw some anecdotal evidence on the pile as I’m wont to do, here’s what’s in my inbox right now. I’m always on-top of my email and keep it clear, so this is a small fraction of various things I’m communicating about.

• A dude I’ve never heard before is showing me some stuff he’s working on and it’s actually pretty interesting and I’m considering asking him if he wants to be a podcast guest.
• The CEO of a company sent me an email about an upcoming launch they have and I want to send him a pitch back about some advertising ideas I think I could help with. Some chance it’s a real win win.
• I’ve been invited to speak at a conference in the fall, and I’ve already met a really interesting co-speaker who I hadn’t met before this, and we’re coordinating time to talk and plan things. They have a cool fancy job and it feels like they are a good person to know.
• A welcome email from some bit of software I’m using for the first time. It so happens it related to email design. I just had a quick play with it and while I’m probably not going to be some long-term user of it, it’s already provided a bit of inspiration I can use.

Why would I throw that out? Email is not causing me pain and misery, it’s friggin’ invaluable to my professional life.

My suspicion, as ever, is that a worker-bee at Big Tech Company has an inbox just overflowing with messages with a super low signal to noise ratio, and that’s the problem. The job is to not get a heaping pile of useless emails, not to blame email as an overall bad communication mechanism.

You can also take steps as an individual to be intentional about how you personally use the tool. Interestingly, Dr. Mark’s research into email use found that batching your email-checking wasn’t really correlated with lower stress (in fact, for some people, it causes higher stress!), but the total amount of time spent on email was correlated with stress. So find ways to use it less – specifically ways to need to use it less, not just trying to use it faster. Unsubscribing from emails, setting up some filter rules, or simply excusing yourself from conversations can pay dividends over time; I try to diligently unsubscribe from unhelpful email, and as a result, my inbox isn’t very distracting.

See I feel like Dan actually gets it.

I tried to unsubscribe from the World of Hyatt emails I was getting. They have an obnoxious email setting screen with lots of negatives to figure out. Like you decline to agree to opt-out to not receive email communications.

But also they say:

3. Write to (include World of Hyatt membership number):
    World of Hyatt Customer Service
    9‌805 Q Street
    Omaha, NE 68127

Please allow at least two (2) full business days from receipt of your message for us to remove your name from our subscriber list.

Me:

---

And of course: related.

This is a boring story that will impress no one.

I needed to look around at options for a third-party company to help with something business-related. I had contact information for three vendors I wanted to talk to. Email addresses, naturally. I communicated with all three of them via email and learned what I needed to learn. It was an efficient and comfortable way to communicate and learn. Decisions were made. Business happened.

Nice essay from Zachary Kai with many quotable bits!

Social media platforms rise and fall like ancient empires sped up a thousand times. Yet email endures. Like the postal service or the printed book. Is it any coincidence these technologies remain my great loves? They share a quality I struggle to name. Perhaps it’s permanence in an ephemeral world. 

On the opportunity to be positive:

The other thing I love about this communication method is it can be intentional, meaningful, hope-filled, and considerate. Or just kind. You can make a small difference with each one you send. Just like a smile.

On the benefit of it being async by nature:

You can choose to engage with it in human time, and so can the recipient: compose when you have something to say, respond when you have space to think.

… email feels different. Richer. Perhaps because they begin with intention rather than an algorithm.

Justin Jackson on how connecting with people face-to-face can be so much more powerful than anything text-based:

I’m convinced that many of society’s problems come from how we communicate online. Social media is a big part of this, but so are the text-based chat tools we use with friends, family, and coworkers.

We have a Communication Problem

A simmering series of arguments were getting bad, but then:

We flew to Mexico. On the first day, we went to a cafe, sat across from each other, and talked. By the time we’d finished our coffee, we’d reached a mutual understanding.

Totally been there. Many times.

Ideally, we’re seeing the most important people we work with pretty regularly face-to-face, and sometimes you gotta work to make that happen.