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.
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.
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.
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.
