Email is good.

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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.

Matt Webb:

Out of Office is one of those weird email features that (a) has hyper usage by certain kinds of professionals (where, say, professional courtesy is a reply within max half a day, and OOO will be set even for public holidays) and (b) for everyone else, sits on that line between kinda lame and actually super helpful.

I’m in the latter camp, and setting my email OOO is an important anxiety reliever when I go away.

Auto reply is one of those features that I don’t think I’ve ever used. It’s not important to me and I actually prefer enforcing the idea that email is an async communication style. While I prefer to respond fairly quickly to email, I do not promise it nor do I expect anyone else to.

I also get it. Lawyers don’t have that luxury, as part of their service is typically fast replies and the work can be important and time-sensitive. But I’ve never really thought of how it’s anxiety relief for some folks, and I can respect that, too.

Matt’s idea here is to get AI in the loop, essentially doing smarter categorization. Drafting responses for the most common stuff and alerting for emails that seem to need it. I don’t think I personally need that right now, but I get it.

Thoughts:

• The ones I’m unsubscribing from that I probably never subscribed to always feels weird, like I’m confirming my email for a spammer.
• Usually you have to click a button to confirm, but not always. I didn’t see any of those tricky ones this week where the button actually says “Stay Subscribed” or “Resubscribe”, but that’s a pissy little dark pattern that should be illegal.
• This isn’t a complete list of the week; I’m sure I forgot to screenshot some. I do this because I have muscle memory for doing it and tend to think it’s worth doing. But wow it’s a lot! If I didn’t do this every week, it’s easy to imagine how out of control email can get.
• Sometimes I’m unsubscribing because if it’s newsletter-like at all, I’d way rather get it over RSS.

Amelia Bellamy-Royds:

… at this point whenever I send an email and don’t get a reply, I just assume that it has been blocked by some over-eager spam filter & that way I don’t have to feel rejected that someone doesn’t have time or interest in replying.

I trust that everyone else likewise assumes the best intentions for me.

Since it’s hard to know why you don’t get a response to an email (without being annoying or intrusive) maybe it’s best to not assume anything bad. You can’t control them, but you can control you.

It’s like when I’m driving and someone speeds in front of me in an unsafe way, rather than go “what a prick”, I go “that baby is coming! get her to the hospital!”. I don’t know what the truth is, so might as well pick the fun one.

Noting this for my online long term memory, as I’ve only just heard of it!

MailMaven:

MailMaven combines the familiarity of Apple Mail
with the power of MailSuite.

I can’t vouch for it yet. I’m still happy on Mimestream, and the design in MailMaven looks a little looser at a glance. I’m intrigued by the “notes” feature though, I know I like having that in team email apps.

Jim Nielsen:

So when the plane begins boarding, for example, I’m told about it with an email, a text, and a push notification.

You really do get a swarm of information coming at you when you’re flying. I can see how someone would think it’s too much. LAY OFF ME.

I wouldn’t say I like it, but I don’t hate it. I feel like email is the most reliable of all of them. The carrier can’t count on push notifications as a variety of personal settings can interfere with them to the point they might not arrive at all. Texts are probably the most useful, but I like a good old fashioned email myself.

I find that my mind is so encompassed by the act of travel that I very much want to have every bit of information about what’s happening as I can. And when that bit of information isn’t relevant anymore, I just swipe it away like anything else.

I’ve talked about Team Handled Email before.

The ultra basic implementation of that is just all sharing a Gmail account or whatever. You’d better check the Terms of Service on whatever email app you use if you’re doing that. I’m pretty sure Google doesn’t like that, and it seems awfully risky when that’s the case.

My team at CodePen uses Front, which is tailor made for team handled email. All in all, it’s a pretty good app for it and I have little complaint. Perhaps in the future I could do a deeper dive and nitpick it, but I’ll save that for another day.

I’ve only just seen Missive which seems weirdly similar. That is to say: pretty darn nice. At first glance it appears the UI might be a smidge cleaner, but you never really know until you really use it. It’s nice to know there are good options out there just in case. I wonder if one of them heavily copied the other? That’s always a little inside baseball I love to know about.

I figured I’d list out the other ones in this category I know about, almost for my own future reference:

• Jelly — Just the most basic and most important features at very fair pricing.
• Help Scout

Actually you know what? I just looked at like 5-6 apps in the “shared inbox” category and all of them look like they’ve gone all-in on this like “ai chatbot” / “agentic customer support” angle and it just grosses me out and I don’t feel like linking to them. I left Help Scout up there — even though they are doing AI stuff too — it feels a bit more tasteful and the focus is still on actually useful features.

Wes Kao:

Before you hit “send,” delete these words from your writing. Your message will be stronger for it.

• fine — “Saying fine sounds like you’re not fine.”
• however — “However” is a melodramatic way to say “but.”
• unfortunately — “Don’t make things sound worse than they actually are.”

I once had my own list but it was focused on educational writing, less-so emails.