Email is good.

I think Brian is saying: Woah woah woah, back off with your demands, email. Whoever is sending this to me is essentially warning me they are a problem in my life. He might be right. But context matters! If it’s spam or spam-like, meh, who cares, take steps to not get email from that source…

When a boss sends a report an email, the power dynamic there says “I expect this to be answered.” When a salesperson sends an email pitching their product or service, the power dynamic is on the potential customer’s side. I’ll answer this if I care to. Sometimes it’s not the role, but the size of…

I kinda laughed at this Delta ad I saw while walking down a jetbridge to a plane the other day. Not zero emails in the inbox, not zero tasks left to complete, you should buy the plane wifi just so you can click on each email and make sure it goes from Unread to read.…

Inbox When Ready is a clever idea. It’s almost like saving you from yourself. Say you have your Gmail tab open all day (like uh, this guy). This doesn’t force you to stop that habit, or from writing a new email, but it prevents you from seeing the actual inbox part and being distracted by…

Embarrassing to be sure. But I wonder how much it happens anymore? Gmail has this beauty: It’s such an extremely good idea I imagine most email clients do something similar. This is my absolute favorite kind of feature. Simple, clear, saves your ass.

Why aren’t they returning your emails more quickly? Maybe you’re in time out. I don’t do it often, but I just had to do it recently to someone and it has me thinking about it. In this case, they were just annoying to deal with. I would provide clear information, then they would respond and…

Minda Zetlin at Inc, crediting advice from Adam Grant: We can collectively cut [the 2 hours and 36 minutes we spend on email every day] way down by adding one simple sentence to the end of every email we send. The sentence should say something like this: “If you can, I would appreciate a response by…

Joni Halabi looks at a bunch of options: Revue, MailChimp, Emma, MailerLite, and ButtonDown. ButtonDown was the best choice for her. Pretty interesting how they offer a physical mail scan-and-forward service to all users. At CodePen, we hand-roll a whole fancy CMS for newsletters and ultimately send them via SparkPost. In my CSS-Tricks days, I…

Figure I better document all my favorite email memes. Wish I had the vectors (and original artists).