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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
… 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.
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.
