Email is good.

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.

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?