Email is good.

If anyone out there wants to answer those questions, I’d be glad to hear them in any format. But then I have bonus questions for you:

I’ve heard this fact about email in a bunch of places so I’m going to note it here in case it becomes interesting to remember later. In the late 1990s, the world fell in love with email. The world was a little late: Queen Elizabeth II had been sending email for decades. In 1976, just…

I half-expected my inbox this morning to be full of (disingenuous) Christmas well-wishing marketing blather. But not this year. I imagine it’s partially due to my (pats own back) diligence in unsubscribing to anything I don’t want, but usually that’s not quite enough on big holidays. I usually get awkward Happy Holidays messages from some…

This is mostly just a note to myself to do what the title says. Clearly quite a few people care about encrypted communication, as they should. There is a big audience for apps like Signal — people that care that their communications are end-to-end encrypted. Email is definitely not end-to-end encrypted… unless you very specifically…

“Report Spam & Unsubscribe” Gmail, notably, offers this feature. I squirm a little every time I see it. If an email is spam, meaning the sender is a criminal, “unsubscribing” means hitting the criminals servers with a request. Why would a criminal honor that request? In fact, wouldn’t a criminal note this request as “ah…

Kind of a genius move from Google to get the biggest name in organizing your life to endorse Google file products. It’s really just fluffy nonsense. Set a goal to process emails daily. Yes, sure, OK. Can-do. The rest of it is just showing you basic surface-level features that already exist, like search. Still, it’s…

Kelly isn’t alone: I take declaring email bankruptcy to mean removing 100% of everything from one’s inbox, status be damned. Unread? Read but not replied to? Doesn’t matter, it’s gone. I’ve rarely hear anyone say it pained them to do it. It’s always liberating or otherwise a good feeling. Hey, I ain’t gonna yuck anyone’s…

Twitter DMs are… ok? You have some level of control over them (on or off for randos) and are, speaking for myself, decently spam moderated. The value I find in them is that people tend to check them, and if I’m trying to reach someone I know from Twitter, it’s a natural choice. But they…

People are drawing this connection. Bastian Allgeier: Mastodon is in many ways similar to email. It’s not just one big platform. There are different servers (instances) and you can choose your home. My first email address was a freenet.de address back in the 90s. A horrible cheap German provider. I moved to various email addresses…

I blogged this over a decade ago, probably as I was starting to be annoyed at how poor introductory emails can be. Let me update and repost the template here: As I read that I’m like, yep, that’s what I want to get. AND YET. Maybe not. Plenty of random business spam follows pretty much…