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.
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.
They call it TEN as in the Text Email Newsletter Standard (TEN Standard). It’s rules for formatting PLAIN TEXT emails (more than 10 haha). Here’s some I really like:
+05: Minimise any introductory or background text at the top of each issue, so that the reader arrives at the ‘contents’ section as soon as possible.
+09: Number all articles, including news and features, consecutively throughout the issue. These numbers should appear in the contents and then immediately after the + or # symbol at the beginning of each story headline, followed by a colon after the number and then straight into the headline.
+16: Try to list web links, email addresses or other internet addresses such as ftp addresses on a separate line, with just the address itself on the line, as this makes them easier to copy onto a clipboard or a browser, helps prevent ‘wrap-around’ or long addresses, and allows screen reader users to skip immediately to the next line if they do not wish to listen to the web address.
New bucket list thing is to list an FTP address in a public text newsletter.
I don’t know about this one. It would be *very hard* for me to stop doing it.
+03: Do not use bold, italics or underlining to convey tone or information, as they are graphical devices, and are sometimes stripped out by email software. Try to convey emphasis instead in your choice of words; or by using phrases such as ‘Please note:’. The use of special characters such as an asterisk * on either side of a word to convey emphasis or for other tonal purposes is not encouraged, as this can be confusing to new readers.
I don’t think they mention line length, but I see the standard itself has hard line breaks at a certain line length. Personally I find that annoying, as if you’re reading *narrower* than that, you get this thing going on which is the worst.
As much as I want to love plain text email only all the time, for something like a newsletter, I prefer a very basic template so you can achieve stuff like basic good typography and links.
… the inbox is invaluable for me, because it acts as a domain-specific todo list: it draws a hard line between the things that have been handled (archived), and the things that are not (inbox). Crossing this line requires an explicit act.
… most people never archive their emails, they just keep everything in the inbox.
I’ve definitely seen this and it freaks me out a little, but I think the idea is that emails are still marked as “read” vs “unread” and they use that as a proxy on if it’s “dealt with” or not. To each their own!
I’m not really sure yet what my overall plans for it will be, so for now, I just pointed the nameservers entirely at Fastmail. It just felt easier than changing MX records only or whatever.
But because I did that, that means web traffic for coyier.com goes to Fastmail too, which served up a very generic “Not Found” (this website doesn’t exist) page. Which is too bad but understandable.
I literally thought to myself… maybe Fastmail does websites? Somehow?
So I figured I’d play with it (I streamed it, subscribe on Twitch), and I saved the video here:
I ended up just making a Pen on CodePen quick, exporting the HTML and CSS, then uploading it to Fastmails “Files” feature, which is what powers their static websites. The feature is extremely bare-bones, but hey, it works.
Once we launch proper deployment on CodePen 2.0 I’ll have CodePen host it of course, which means I’ll need to deal with those MX records and all that, which is fine.
A bunch of people wrote to me after I blogged that I picked up coyier.com saying that using it for email would be the perfect usage. Particularly since chris@coyier.com is pretty cool, and could use it for other family members potentially.
I pulled the trigger and did it, so feel free to email me at that address. I also went with a “catchall” so any address @coyier.com should come to me. No noise at all so far. This blog post might change that haha.
The domain is on GoDaddy and I’m not using it for anything else right now, so I just pointed the nameservers at Fastmail and it all works fine. It makes the domain, when visited from the web, a “Not Found” page though we which isn’t super ideal. Then I saw that Fastmail can host a static website, which is kinda awesome. I think I’ll plop something up there one of these days.
At the moment I don’t plan to make my coyier.com stuff my “official” email address, and I just haven’t though through entirely how a transition like that would work. I’m not unhappy using chriscoyier@gmail.com on Gmail. If I were to “switch”, that setup would need to continue to work forever, so there would have to be some setup where I’m receiving at both in a nice combined setup.
For now, using a totally different provider should be a fun way to dip toes into something different. I can check out the website and mobile app, both of which seem pretty nice so far. As Viktor commented before, there is a native macOS app (third-party) as well, which could be fun to check out. I was also told that there is a minor concern that the app is Australian and there is some law that required it to have a back door for the government. That’s the kind of thing that I both don’t like but also that doesn’t affect me all that much.
Accessibility in HTML emails remains critically under-addressed in 2025.
This is a good report outlining the major issues and causes, then going through each issue on exactly what the problem is. There is some serious low-hanging fruit here like having a <title> and including the lang attribute on the <html>.
I’m curious about text-only emails. Are they… way better? Subject to some accessibility problems I’ve never even heard of?
I’m reasonably confident I’ve tried every privacy-friendly email provider out there. I prefer some over others and haven’t run into any significant issues with any of them.
While I’ve tried every provider in the list, I found myself returning to and sticking with Fastmail.
I recently picked up coyier.com and it might be a good excuse to set up some email addresses using it as well as try some of these other providers, like Fastmail.
