Email is Good

Tucked away in a listicle from Clo S. titled How to Make your Email Inbox Calmer:

We outsource to inboxes the storage of memories, to-dos, information streams to stay in touch with our favourite topics, and more. Your inbox is your own space on the Internet, private by default, with a key – your email address – that lets you access the rest of your Internet identity and spaces: social media, medical platforms, forums, state institutions, entertainment with your own playlists and tailored algorithmic suggestions, amongst others. You may use it both to pay your taxes and to log in to an intimate anon account on a kink-specific Mastodon server. Talk about having range.

The actual tips in there are pretty good too. They have a certain vagueness that is required when attempting to deliver advice on something like email where everyone uses it so differently.

You got this one:

And you got this one:

I prefer the latter, as it doesn’t force you to look at any one particular email all the time, you can default to the overview.

I gotta ask around about this more. For a long time I managed a bunch of very separate email addresses. For example, my personal email at chriscoyier@gmail.com, a general CSS-Tricks email at team@css-tricks.com, and my CodePen-specific email chris@codepen.io. They all happened to be Google-based, so that made it easier-ish. The mobile Gmail app was happy to let me look at a combined inbox, but apparently, there is no desktop version of that? Isn’t that weird?

I’m curious if people like/prefer combined inboxes (however they “host” their email), or prefer looking at inboxes separately. One challenge surely is making sure that when you send email it goes out from the proper account. That seems manageable enough if a bit error-prone.

It’s been a hot minute since this dude was answering emails.

The first one was uploaded to YouTube in 2009, but was actually first published in 2001.

Making fun of peoples email via email is a great use of email.

I was kinda preparing to roll my eyes at this, but it’s pretty good!

What I like are the actual examples, even if they are made generic. Definitely prefer seeing good/bad examples rather than just stating a tip without backing it up with an example.

This is a good line:

Therein lies the beauty of a well crafted email. Not only does it help you, the sender, come across as more capable by showcasing strong communication skills, but it also saves the read so much of their time by only surfacing information relevant to them.

These are the tips, but watch the video for the context and examples:

1. Have a “Call to Action” in the subject line (and potentially estimate the time to do it)
2. Use only one email thread per topic (for context)
3. Tell people who you are adding/removing from a thread and why
4. Start with the main point. Even if it needs context, do it below
5. Summarize in the reply
6. Hyperlink when possible (gotta love actual linked text vs barfed out entire URLs)

It ends with some kinda cliche all-time-classics like not reply-all-ing on accident (by changing some default settings).

An interesting thing about all this: it’s all about sending email. I like that in one sense. You should be good at sending emails. That’s a good place to be when you’re honing those skills. But in general, I find most people’s actual problem with email is on the receiving side. They get too much, it’s unorganized and overwhelming, they miss important things, anxiety prevents useful replies, etc.

Getting your receiving house in order alone will help your sending as you’ll have more time to focus on it.

Y'all ever try the…

<form method="get" action="https​://your-site.com/reviews" target="_blank">

…thing in an HTML email?

It totally works, you can put interactive form elements right in the email and a button to submit it and it goes.

It’s a smidge awkward as, in the case of Gmail in the browser, Gmail confirms that you want to do it and blocks the popup by default that you have to un-block.

But once you've taken the time to fill out a form, you're in the mood to just "OK" whatever little blockers come up.

Originally tweeted by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on April 12, 2022.

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I like the idea of a single “search bar” input in there.

It occurred to me while swiping away some finance related emails that the concept of autopay is helpful to my inbox. I get an email about the fact that my monthly payment for my leased truck is coming due. Archive! That’ll just pay itself. I get an email from a credit card that the monthly payment is due. Archive! Autopay is configured there too.

This is a privileged position to be in. There were plenty of times in my life I had to time paying bills just right to avoid overdrafts. Autopay would have caused me more grief that I was ready for.

But now that finances have stabilized in my old age, I absolutely ensure that automatic payments are set up just so that I won’t be troubled month after month to deal with it. I’m not annoyed by the emails themselves, they remind me we are still incurring that cost, and some of them have useful info in them (e.g. remaining balance).

I think this type of thing is why a real inbox makeover can’t just happen overnight. A dreaded inbox is dreaded not only because of how many emails are in it, but because of emails that represent actual chores, and that fixing any single one of them is a chore in itself.

I mentioned in February I was trying the email client Shortwave, and it feels worth reporting that we’re now in April and I’m still on it!

I have little mini flings with email clients fairly regularly and always find my way back to something that is either just Gmail itself or some wrapper that doesn’t actually touch the Gmail UI.

Shortwave is for Gmail, but replaces the UI entirely, so for me, that’s harder to get right and usually what ends up losing me. In this case, it’s what is keeping me. The UI is just pleasant enough to use that I would miss it if I went back. Nothing fancy, just the Markdown formatting, the paste-URL-over-selected-text-to-link-it, the smooth swiping, the pinning idea.

It’s a tightrope though. There are things already having me open back up Gmail directly. You can’t view your spam folder, for example, so if you have a feeling something went there, you gotta go back. Same for the “All Mail” view. I had wiped away an appointment confirmation email an hour or two and didn’t have any way to go back and look for that, since I couldn’t think of a good search term and it wasn’t showing up in conversations. There is also a more elusive “trust” feeling. Like if you’re waiting for a very important email to arrive, I found myself back in the Gmail interface, unsure if there would be delay between Gmail itself and the Shortwave wrapper. So while I’m still on Shortwave for now, it’ll have to keep innovating and improving likely to hold on.

It’s a tough game out there. I had on my list of things to check out an email client called Tempo. I bookmarked it back in September. “The email client that helps you focus”, they said. And by the time I went to check it out today, I discovered it had closed down last October.

We put our heart and soul into Tempo, and are proud of what we have achieved. Unfortunately, that’s not always enough. Due to a mix of running out of steam both energy-wise and financially, we sadly don’t see a path forward for Tempo as a company.

Rooting for Shortwave here though.

Shit User Story:

(Insert the meme where even if the meeting actually is an email, nobody wants that either.)

There are different expectations for different emails. It’s tempting to make broad declarations like “emails don’t have the same expectation of immediate reply as a text message does”, but that’s not taking into account any context.

If your boss emails you and says “Take a look at this and let me know your thoughts”, there might be work culture expectations that this is done immediately. Maybe your next raise depends on it. That’s a Work Email. Whereas if you get an email like “Check out this new app we made, let’s talk integration ideas” from someone you don’t even know, the expectations there are very different. A fast reply might signal extreme eagerness and a slow reply some kind of power play. That’s a “Work” Email. I say “Work” in quotes as it’s Work-related but likely not a direct and vital responsibility like a Work Email. Different context.

I mention this as I think most people deal with all sorts of different emails. Work and “Work” being just two buckets. There is Family, Friends, Side-Project, News, Purchases, Life-Management, and the UGHAKDKH-Bucket, to name a few of my own. Strategies for dealing with overwhelming email situations depend on the context. Are Work Emails causing overload? The solution to that is wholly different than an overload of “Work” or other bucks of emails. I want to make sure if I attempt to dole out email advice that it’s context aware.