Email is good.

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.

Fernando Borretti in Inboxes are Underrated

Another interesting observation:

… 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 just mentioned I picked up coyier.com and used Fastmail with it.

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?

I web searched for the idea and they do.

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.

The Email Markup Consortium says:

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?

Cory Dransfeldt:

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.

It’s one of those Email + AI tools.

1. Get back one hour every day
2. Email chaos can ruin your holidays
3. It makes email work for humans
4. Email doesn’t work for the way we work now
5. Great people in normal jobs are struggling to do great things because their inbox is failing them
6. It will help you make more sales
7. It will make you happier and love your life more
8. You’ll have more time to spend with the people you love

I haven’t actually tried it. To be honest, it seems like a pretty decent idea (except the weird “also it joins your zoom calls” thing). I like how it doesn’t really touch anything aside from categorization and drafting potential responses you can take or leave.

I just think the marketing is disingenuous and obnoxious. I don’t blame them really, going big with marketing claims is probably the only way to stand out with a tool like this and the series A probably demands it. I’m just extra eye-roll-y with this particular topic.

It’s not the writing of the email replies that takes time, it’s actually doing the work that the email relates to. The rest of it, organizing your inbox and keeping it clean, is still work you really need to use your own brain for.

A very focused website with an idea, so I’ll just quote the whole thing.

The Problem

E-mail takes too long to respond to, resulting in continuous inbox overflow for those who receive a lot of it.

The Solution

Treat all email responses like SMS text messages, using a set number of letters per response. Since it’s too hard to count letters, we count sentences instead.

two.sentenc.es is a personal policy that all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be two sentences or less. It’s that simple.

There are also three-, four-, and five-sentence versions.

I like a good focused email, for sure. No need to be extra wordy in an email or provide a bunch of context that could be implied or linked to.

But I’m not sure it needs to be so dogmatic. I think of some very long emails I get with information about being a speaker at a conference, and those emails can be great.

Emails should just be as long as they need to be.

Todoist has a feature where you can forward email to a special address and it becomes a TODO:

Turn your emails into Todoist tasks by forwarding them to a project. When you forward an email, the subject line will become the task name, and the body of the email will be added as an attachment in a comment.

Given the overlap between emails and TODO items, that makes sense to me. I use Things myself, and hearing about this made me look and see if they have the feature, and lo-and-behold they do. I think this will be a nice little benefit for me, where instead of letting an email linger in the inbox (where I’ll see and think about it too often until it’s done), I can kick it over to Things. I’ll still deal with it, it will just prevent me from overly staring at it and occupying an unfair number of mental cycles.

I actually heard it from Todoist’s announcement that they slapped some AI into the feature. Sure? I guess? More interesting to me was the thinking behind how to integrate AI into Todoist. The more “invisible” it is, the better the feature feels, essentially. Which is a whole new thing to worry about.

Steve Hayman:

Mail on the NeXT Computer was pretty amazing in 1991. Multimedia! Fonts! Attachments! Sounds! It’s hard to overstate how cool that was compared to the command line email everybody was used to.

These couldn’t have been HTML emails as that wasn’t really formalized until 1993. So some proprietary thing, I suppose, that only worked between NeXT computers. Maybe it had a plain text fallback too? Just like HTML emails have now. Maybe that was the origin of that idea, not sure.

Steve’s story was actually about email aliases and how snagging steve@next.com probably wasn’t the smartest idea in the world.

That makes me think about the .com part. What were domain names like next.com primarily for during like 1989-1993 if HTML wasn’t a thing yet? Mostly email? FTP? Telnet?

It also makes me think about wildcard/catch-all email addresses. As in, I wonder if it’s actually useful to set up something that catches any email to *@chriscoyier.net and forwards it to me. Or if that’s inviting in spam for no good reason.