Email is good.

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?

I feel like I can’t let this blog exist without mentioned the existence of Strong Bad. He’s this old-internet comedy series character (part of the Homestar Runner series) who’s bits included reading the email he gets from viewers. From Wikipedia:

n 2021, Polygon declared Strong Bad an icon. In a tribute, they note that “Strong Bad Email was far and away the most popular segment on Homestar Runner”

He recently had a new one, which is amazing since it’s like 25 years old.

It's Monday. So I thought I'd checka my email.flashy: homestarrunner.com/sbemails/210…tubey: youtu.be/-zhsNdk1_Vc?si

— Strong Bad (@strongbadnofoolin.bsky.social) 2025-11-24T14:19:28.839Z

Agree with Andy Baio:

I love that they’re still making these in Flash, played with the Ruffle emulator

If you ever make fun of people’s grammar in emails as you read them, it might be a thing you do that got stuck in your brain after watching Strong Bad do it in your formative years.

Just got two emails that I thought were quite nice. It reminds me of an opinion I’ve really held strong for quite a while. I even made a template for it one time, and I wrote:

if we go for HTML email, we can apply just enough layout and styles to make it almost like a plain text email, only with a bit more class.

• A pleasant readable typeface
• Reasonable line length
• Breathable line height
• Anchor links on words
• Dark/light mode

Here’s one from Cursor:

I find a “button” style could be added to that short list of OK things in an otherwise chill HTML email. But I really like how short and sweet the email is. Begs to be actually read.

And one from Mandy Brown:

Probably the nicest typography of any newsletter ever. But really isn’t doing that much to pull it off, just a nice typeface with smart setting.

Nic Chan:

A “fuck off contact page” is what a company throws together when they actually don’t want anyone to contact them at all. They are usually found on the websites of million or billion dollar companies, likely Software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies that are trying to reduce the amount of money they spend on support by carefully hiding the real support channels behind login walls.

I love the image. Says it’s all.

I can’t imagine a company that is run in such a way there isn’t even an email for reaching them.

Gina Trapani:

I like to keep my email inbox clear and deal with messages as they come in, and archive or delete them when I’m done. But I’d fallen deeply behind on my personal email inbox a few years ago and never dug myself out.

Realizing I had almost 4,000 unprocessed threads, I considered declaring email bankruptcy and moving on. But I wanted to build up my muscle of handling incoming messages each day, to unsubscribe from newsletters and marketing I didn’t want, and to build a list of people I want to be in touch with—and who I’ve ignored for far too long.

YES.

I think the best way to get on top of your email is to put in the work and get on top of your email. Chipping away at it, doing the things you need to do along the way so that it doesn’t get so bad again, is the job. Motivating yourself by tracking progress, as Gina has done here with a home-brewed app, is awesome.

I’m afraid I won’t be answering Julie here.

For one, it feels a bit like spam. Like a response just marks in a database some where they’ve got a live one.

For two, that broken image feels awfully suspicious, like it’s trying to do the same.

For three, even if Julie happens to be real and it’s a genuine question, it’s just weird. What book? Why not just ask what you want to ask? Don’t ask to ask. It’s the opposite of polite.

Maybe I’ll make this Chris’ Law #893.

I feel like if I get a text message, any text message, I should be able to respond to it. Like if it’s an appointment reminder, cool, thanks, I can respond to it and tell you to cancel it. Or confirm it. Or ask you clarifying questions. And whoever or whatever is on the other end should answer me.

I feel like if my phone rings, I can pick it up and there should be an opportunity to talk to someone. Ya know, like phones facilitate.

I feel like I get an email, I should be able to respond to that email with whatever makes sense.

Down with “do not reply to this text”.

Down with automated robot phone calls.

Down with noreply@buisness.com.

We live by this at CodePen. If we send you an email, the replyto email address is support@codepen.io and you can reply to it and talk to us. Anything from a transactional email to the weekly newsletter. The volume, at many millions of users, is manageable.

If you’re poking your customers with communications, they should be able to poke you back.

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It’s common for an email client to have both Archive and Delete buttons.

Which means you’re essentially forced into developing your own strategy for when to use one or the other.

(We could factor in “spam” as well, as that is another option. But I think everyone largely agrees you spam spam.)

When GMail launched in 1852 (jk 2004) I remember there was a fairy concerted message of “just archive everything” because they were offering such a massive amount of storage for free. They wanted you to save everything. Theoretically it was good for you to have a searchable history of everything, and theoretically it was good for them, as they’ve forever “trained” on mass amounts of data.

In fact, you can see in early UI of Gmail the archive button was the only button not tucked behind an additional menu.

I definitely drank that message and have pretty much only archived since then. So my strategy is essentially:

• Archive: Everything
• Delete: Nothing

Just recently I talked to someone who said they make heavy use of that Delete button, using it as their primary button. I showed them an example of an appointment reminder for a tire change. They said they would 100% delete that email (after the appointment was over). My instinct was like but what if next year you needed to remember something about tire changes? Where and when you did it, etc? But that’s just my weird brain. Their strategy was mostly:

• Archive: Very Little
• Delete: Almost Everything

What do you get for that strategy? Well, you’ll probably never come close to running out of space. When you go back and search your email later, you’ll get clean search results of only things you’ve very specifically chosen to save. The risk is that you over-delete making archival search not particularly useful.

Perhaps there is a baby bear strategy?

• Archive: Anything you have a feeling might be useful
• Delete: Anything you’re pretty sure would be useless in the future

Anyone actually do that? I’m very tempted to change my ways to this. I’m mostly happy I have a huge searchable archive of email, but I have to admit that it’s so loaded with garbage it can make search results kind of a mess to sift through.