Simplify is a browser plugin by the one-man-team Michael Leggett that cleans up the UI of Gmail. I like it OK. I’ve tried it a few times and it tends not to stick though, probably because I have some muscle memory for some feature that’s not hidden or something and generally I’m not distracted by…

I’m not necessarily advocating that as general advice, but it is advice that I hear a lot. It came up yesterday in a conversation about asking a local grocery story to care a certain type of peppers. Might as well ask, right? The worst that can happen is that they don’t carry the new peppers…

There is something to like there. A reminder to people about the response expectations of this email. It also scares me a little bit. Isn’t this the implied social contract of emails? Hasn’t it always been, but especially now-days with many different more immediate communication methods where the social contract is less defined? I also…

When I open my mail email account for Team CSS-Tricks and every single email is someone reaching out to put spam on our site. The email itself isn’t really spam. It’s a real person (although I doubt it’s a real person named “Lisa Turnbull”) using templates to try to get site owners to update blog…

Thanks to Rick Saenz for pointing me to Edmund Wilson’s “Decline Letter”. The earliest reference I can find to it is Tim Ferris’ blog, but Edmund Wilson was born in 1895, so I imagine this has been bouncing around for a while, as evidenced by the extreme artifacting of this image. This is a bit…

You know what nobody does over email? Send a message saying “hi” and then wait for you to respond before saying what they need to say. I feel like even if your best friend or boss did that over email, I’d just delete it. But it’s such a common thing over messaging apps like Slack,…

Here’s an email moment where I feel like an asshole. This is something I want to improve. Here’s here’s a really specific example (but I’m thinking broader, generally). I get an email today from a real, regular, normal person. I don’t know them whatsoever. They aren’t overtly rude, but they want something from me. They…

One big advantage of having your email go through Gmail is the spam filtering. I don’t know of anything that’s going to do a better job than that, especially for the zero-effort and zero-cost. I just used Gmail for a complete “intermediary”, by recommendation from a tool-creator, so I thought I’d write it up. Feedbin…

Within a few days of each other, I got these email notifications of acquaintances praising different email clients. Here’s Julie loving Edison (not sure if it’s Edison Mail or OnMail or what). (Edison is so wild in that they are like: we read your email and sell the data, but, like, anonymously, and they spell…