One thing thats worth some deeper discussion at some point is what your email address actually is. Is your full name in it? Is it clever or straightforward? Is it on a major email provider or do you use your own domain?

I’ve always been slightly weird in that I trust people’s email address on a major email provider more than I trust their own domains. Like if I have two emails for you, one being hello@rangleknobs.com and the other being suzannepitts@gmail.com, I trust being able to reach you at the gmail.com address more, but there is less technologically that can go wrong there. It’s not like a huge problem, but I find if an email is going to bounce or fail to deliver, it will be at your custom setup.

But I say that I’m weird in that generally I think people have more trust for owned-domain emails. Like that establishes a “real business” more than using some free service does. Fair enough.

That leads me to Sidemail, which is just a random link I came across and figured I’d share. The point of the service (2 bucks a month for one project), is that you can have a “team@my-project.com” email address set up, but not have to deal with the technical debt (aside from trusting them). You still use your personal inbox, but you can receive and send from this custom-domain email.

Seems like a good middle ground. I’ve always done best with a single inbox. I have drifted away from that lately (having shared inboxes with unique shared groups of people) and email has gotten harder because of it. Maybe I’ll have to take some steps to unify again.