Email is good.

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.

Miski Omar:

I get a ping from the family group chat, which doubles as an IT helpdesk for my mum. My best friend just FaceTimed me about a White Lotusepisode, and another left a voice note crying about a possible diagnosis. All this, lodged between videos of cats and genocide.

The boundaries between reception and responsehave collapsed.

I’m switching lanes like a Subway Surfer. Digital whiplash has branded itself on to my cheek.

Understandable and fair.

In a way it’s a nice problem to have that so many real life people you know are communicating with you that you can’t keep up with it. Certainly better than the lonliness of the opposite. Me, I’d prioritize all those, work second, and skip the social media roadshow. I’d bet the overwhelm comes mostly from sources that people aren’t actually connected to in any way, and I hope history looks back on that and laughs.

I see this go around once in a while and I thought I’d post it so I have my own copy of it. I‘ll link to Maggie’s Instagram as it looks like the URL points there anyway.

Just a simple, lovely, clever idea where an email address just happens to be the longest identifier and contains several other nested identifiers.

A quiz by Sam Rose.

It gets weirder the further you go. Like:

Did you know emails could have comments? Anything (in parens) is a comment. Introduced in RFC 822, but made obsolete by RFC 5322.

And you can use square brackets to provide an IP instead of a domain??

I’m not even close to a heavy user yet, but I have to admit that Fastmail has been really nice to use as an email client. I could see going primary with it at some point.

While we’re on a little Fastmail kick here, I thought I’d share Jason’s “Mail rules on Fastmail that make my life better“. My favorite is the use of filtering mail by looking for certain headers. That’s some cool nerd shit I could get into.