“Email lists grow slowly, but their growth is sturdier than social networks.”

Robin Rendle, who writes the email newsletter for CSS-Tricks and has a email newsletter of his own called Adventures in Typography, quotes a bit from Robin Sloan’s book How to Make a Book:

Of all the followings you can accrue—on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and platforms yet to be invented—one is more important than the rest by an order of magnitude. It’s the group of people who have given you their old-fashioned email addresses and agreed that they would, from time to time, like to hear from you. Even if no one quite loves their inbox, everyone has one. Across generations and geography, through digital fads and fascinations, email is the common denominator, the magic key.

Email lists grow slowly, but their growth is sturdier than social networks. It’s exciting to see the sharp little bursts of attention on the social networks when something you write takes off. But it’s easy come, easy go; as quickly as attention finds you, it moves on, eager for the next thing. Email lists are sturdier and stickier. There is a real sense, you’ll find, of building them one person at a time.

Robin (Rendle) goes on to say about email:

After an email goes out there’s often nothing but radio silence from the other side and then I begin to worry for half a second whether anybody is reading them at all. I probably just have to remember that every social network has been training me as a writer, for the better part of a decade now, to be dependent on those likes and faves and retweets for my emotional well-being.

It’s pretty much radio silence. Once in a while, people respond to the newsletter with something they’d like to share or some little anecdote. I should do a better job at passing those along to the team, but Robin’s point stands, it’s nothing like the engagement feedback you get on other platforms, which is weirdly at odds with the fact that the actual engagement is likely much higher.

Spam vs. Junk

I really think you should be unsubscribing a lot. An inbox full of only things that matter is a good place to be.

But when you’re doing that unsubscribing, what you’re unsubscribing from is junk not spam. Spam, hopefully, is a very small problem for you. Perhaps a few spam emails leak into your inbox a week and you click the button to mark them as spam. Junk is the real problem. Junk is real email that you just don’t care about.

An inbox full of junk is the #1 contributor to email overload that people experience. Their inbox has 2,874 unread emails, because 2,764 of them are junk. That feels like an extraordinary amount of work to come back from. My advice is to chip away at it over time.

What you shouldn’t do is tediously click and delete each one at a time. Just deleting them is a very temporary solution. They’ll be back. Chipping away at it means opening one, hitting that unsubscribe link and following through with that on the web (they’ll try to trick you six ways to Sunday to stay subscribed), and then deleting the email. Don’t worry about them not honoring your unsubscribe or making you a target for more email you don’t want. There are literal laws against that and unsubscribing is effective.

Sometimes it does take a while though.


“Ugjkadgk. I’m terrible at email.”

It’s like a catchphrase these days. Everybody trying to one-up each other about how bad at email they are. You don’t fit in at dinner parties unless you “like all music except country and rap” and “haven’t looked at my inbox in a month.”

It downright scares me when I hear this from otherwise successful people. It’s straight up saying “I’m unreliable” which is a truly bizarre thing to announce, even if it’s true. They’ll gleefully tell you how they just archive massive swathes of emails in an effort to start fresh. A worthy goal, surely, but how many people were just left hanging? Nothing good is going to come from that.

I quite literally don’t want to work with someone, in any capacity, who I can’t expect email responses from. It’s unreliable and unprofessional.

I don’t wanna stress you out, but there is a better way than giving up on your inbox. You can chip away at it. You can be more vigilant at unsubscribing. You can create filters to programmatically remove things. Maybe you can even outsource it to an assistant if you have the means.

Perhaps over time on this blog we’ll gather up as many strategies as we can to fight an unruly inbox.

Emailing Yourself

I email myself. A lot. I’m still trying to figure out if it’s a bad habit or not. It’s a tough call.

By doing it, it’s effectively making my inbox my to-do list. That feels a slightly problematic because it’s a to-do list that isn’t entirely of my own making. It’s letting the world control my to-do list. Not to mention that I already use another app for my to-do list (I like Things).

But somehow it doesn’t bother me that much. It’s just a little reminder to myself to deal with it later. I often end up moving it to my more official to do lists. Or I just deal with the thing right away. Or it was just a link to something interesting anyway so it goes into my separate workflow for that. Emails to myself never seem to feel like a burden.

I’d say 50% of the email I sent to myself is simply a subject line with enough to remember why I’m doing it. For example, I spot a typo in a blog post and can’t fix it right then, so I write an email to myself quick that says “Typo: applience” or whatever the word was.

The other 50% is from Mail To Self, which adds a quick sharing button that blasts whatever I’m looking at on my iPhone to my email.

How often do you email yourself?

Drip Campaigns

Drip emails are those emails you get after creating an account on a website that come after certain periods of time.

Drip, drip, drip, like a leaky faucet, and sometimes just as unwelcome.

But email is such a strong way to talk to users, and companies know it. A well-done drip campaign can educate users and re-engage them. Possibly getting these users to upgrade or lose less of them to churn. I recently signed up for You Need A Budget (YNAB) and actually quite liked their drip emails.

Useful, and hopefully effective drip emails is exactly what we were hoping to do in a recent stab at that at CodePen. But it’s likely we went a little too far, and have reeled it back a little. We’re still trying to figure it out.

Listen to me and my co-workers Jake Albaugh and Marie Mosley talk all about drip email campaigns over on the CodePen Radio podcast.

Unsubscribing

Sometimes I’ll go on an unsubscribing tear. It’ll happen around some fake holiday like Black Friday or Cyber Monday when even the laziest of marketers manage to pull together a DEALS DEALS DEALS email.

I’m sure we’ll all experienced this. Your inbox will fill up with marketing emails from companies you haven’t heard from in ages. Email overload sets in harder than it normally does. So unlike a normal day, where I might just archive a marketing email to be done with it, the overload pushes me into action and I start unsubscribing en masse. I almost can’t wait for another one to show up so I can get myself off that list.

No barricade is too high. I’ll reset my damn password to your app so I can log in and manually adjust my email preferences – a hoop jumping that normally makes my blood boil. 

But lately, I’ve extended this unsubscribing vigor throughout the year. My unsubscribing finger is a hair trigger.

The vigilance feels like it has paid off in that my inbox feels clean and full of only important and relevant things. It’s work, though. I probably unsubscribe from 2-4 things a day. That sounds unreal as I type it, but it’s true. I shop for things online. I buy tickets. I subscribe to services. I test stuff out. I end up on a lot of email lists and it requires constant scrubbing.

It’s like keeping a house clean, isn’t it? To really keep a house clean, you work at it constantly. You do the dishes and sink every day. You sweep up after yourself. You leave rooms a little cleaner than you found them. Then you do bigger cleaning jobs weekly and monthly. You don’t let it become completely filthy and become overwhelmed by the thought of cleaning at all.

You can start today. Unsubscribe from something. Even if you do one a day, you’ll see progress.

Unsubscribing is also a good baby step toward better email productivity in general. If you can’t be bothered to unsubscribe from junk, it’s likely going to be hard to get the rest of that house in order. If you can, you’re already building momentum. 

Slack vs Email

I seem to remember some of Slack’s early marketing was a bit anti-email. Slack is a new way of communicating on a team that stops the need for email. To some degree, I think (and hope) they are right.

I’m betting most of you have heard of Slack, but if not, it’s like a private chat app for businesses and other less formal groups. For example, I have a Slack for CodePen, the business I run. All CodePen employees are in the Slack, and we talk in there every day.

What’s so interesting about Slack is that it’s partially async. It’s real time chat, but I find maybe 50% of communication on Slack is actually real time chat. It’s often a chat that is broken up with significant time delays. Someone leaves a message and someone else answers it an hour later.

I might post a message like this in Slack:

✨Reminder! We have a new thing launching on Monday. 

The draft of the email announcing it is here: 
The Merge Request in GitLab is here: 

Person X, you’re responsible for Y. I’ll be doing Z. Go team 🎉

That’s kind of like an email. I don’t really need a response immediately, it’s just a broadcasting of information. That could have been an email, but I’m glad it’s not. I’m grateful Slack cuts down on that kind of email. Mostly because I know how differently everyone feels about email and how differently everyone handles email. I essentially don’t trust that the email will reach everyone in time, that they will for sure read it, and do what needs to be done. I trust my Slack message more in this circumstance.

Slack is often not that formal. We’re often just chit-chatting about interesting things we’ve seen on the internet, helping each other troubleshoot some code, or even sharing baby pictures in a dedicated channel. Those things aren’t replacing email, for the most part.

This real-time text-based communication is vital for teams. I’ve literally never worked in a tech job, remote or not, without having something like it. The first jobs I had we did it all over AOL instant messages. That evolved and changed into different apps over time, and Slack is just the most recent in that evolution. There has got to be a way to talk your team that is less intense than phone or video, but more synchronous than email. I think we’ll always need that. If we didn’t have Slack now, we’d be using Discord or HipChat or some other app making its way in this space.

Slack is more than just chat, to be fair. They allow for audio, video, and even screensharing as well. What you post in chat can take many forms too, from photos and video to URLs with expanded previews, to snippets of code and long form posts. Add-ons can even completely customize what a message can be. It’s pretty fancy. 

Yet, I wouldn’t call it an email killer. I can’t find any current Slack marketing that claims that it is. In the same way we don’t generally make our address or phone number public, we don’t share a Slack with most of the world.

Personally, even when I do share a Slack with someone I want to get a message to, it’s not 100% that I’ll chose to message them over Slack. Even though there is some level of I’ll get to this as soon as I can async vibe that happens within teams on Slack, sending a private message still feels like it has some urgency to it, which I don’t always want to convey. Almost like you’re avoiding sending an email because you want an answer quicker.

Here’s another little story just to underscore the idea that everyone is different when it comes to communication preferences. My co-founder Tim, it seems to me, does email just fine. But he doesn’t like it. And in fact, he’ll take steps to make sure that any new upcoming situation is mostly handled outside of email.

For example, if we’re about to start working with a new contractor, by the second or third email back and forth with them, they are being invited as a “single channel guest” to our Slack team. Even people like lawyers and contractors who you might not assume are into the idea of installing a new app to talk to one client. I’m almost always surprised how well that works out and that the people are into it.

When do kids get their first email?

It might be before they are born. Super popular email services like Gmail are still somewhat of a land-grab for getting names that aren’t saddled with awkward extra characters or numbers. If you can get a good full name, many do.

Technology sometimes forces us into it, so they can have important accounts:

Like Apple or Facebook. Chris Enns needed one for his kid in 5th grade to set up Xbox and other gaming related things.

Sometimes we do it for the most beautiful reasons:

10-11 Years Old

This seems like a common age.

Facebook requires you to be 13 though, so I bet that’s another common cliff.

In School

5th or 6th grade seems to be the most common right now. For me (born 1980), I think I had one (probably AOL) in high school, but the first one I used heavily was the one they gave me in college. At the end of college I set up chriscoyier@gmail.com and that’s been my main ever since.

How old are you now and how old were you when you got your first email? How about your first email that you actually used?

Everybody has an email

Even the kids these days. Schools give it to them or their parents set it up for them. 

They might not take it very seriously, preferring other ways to communicate, but they have it and understand it. Email is largely free and thus the one true global communication method on the planet, especially because email is almost always public.

I’ve already gotten a few emails from this brand spankin’ new blog already (💙). Here’s an entire email from Keith Pickering:

Email is basically the pinnacle of human communication.

For thousands of years, long distance communication was handled via text. If you received an important letter, you could hold on to it for the rest of your life if you wanted to. Then the telephone came out, and people apparently forgot everything that made letters great.

I can’t begin to tell you how I hate phone calls. If you’re shooting the breeze with a loved one, sure, a phone call is great. But for literally anything business related, I just can’t comprehend why people are so phone crazy. What a bumbling, stressful, inconvenient, inefficient form of communication it is.

When I have a phone call scheduled, step 1 is to freak out for an hour while I try to plan out every response I could potentially make. Step 2 is the actual call, then Step 3 is both parties forgetting the entire content of the conversation until it’s clarified via – you guessed it – email.

If I communicate with someone via email, I don’t have to take notes. I don’t have to fill awkward silence with “um”s while I’m thinking of what to say. I don’t have to worry, because I’m in complete control of what I’m getting across, and the other person will only see it once it’s perfect. Regular people have had email for what, 25 years?

It’s time for it to take its rightful place as our primary communication method.

I think a lot of people have a similar dislike of phone calls. I did for most of my life. I’m chilling out on that a little bit as I get older. Not sure why exactly. Perhaps it’s being a new dad and knowing how much more personal talking to family is when it’s their real voice. Maybe it’s just a realization that some communication is better when it’s more off-the-cuff and faster.

Anyway, I agree with Keith, email is the dang pinnacle of human communication and perhaps only isn’t hailed as the hero it is as much as it could be because of the mixed emotions it stirs up in people. We need to get into that soon.

Email is Public

An email can be from your business partner of a decade, a stranger who likes something you’ve said and wants to tell you, a troll from across the globe who wants to angrily finger waggle at you, or the computer system at the pharmacy letting your know your prescriptions are ready.

Most folks will give their email address to just about anybody, or make it entirely public. It’s often the only communication method they do that with. On the current version of my personal website, I put it in plain text right in the footer:

Email address in footer at chriscoyier.net

Your inbox is a wilderness in the way your incoming phone calls likely are not.

Phone calls are much more sacred. Most folks don’t publicly post their personal phone number. They don’t want phone calls from people they don’t know. I sure as heck don’t. They don’t want texts at all hours of the day. That’s what email is for, thank you very much.

They rarely post their address either. Perhaps a P.O. box or business address, but not a personal addresses. Personal letters are wonderful, but not from strangers posted to the address I sleep at. That feels quite literally dangerous.

Even publishing your Facebook profile is more and more rare. Again a business account, sure, but not my personal account. That’s already full of garbage without strangers engaging with me there.

Email, though. People will share their email address publicly. Strangers can email you and, while it’s not always awesome, it doesn’t feel nearly as scary or unwelcome. Email is much easier to manage.

Once in a while I run across someone who I’m trying to contact who’s clearly intentionally made it impossible to find their email address. You can always tell, as we all secretly thing we’re amazing internet sleuths and can’t be easily foiled in a simple game of hunt for the email. In the end, we think no problem, this person clearly doesn’t like email and does not want to be contacted for any reason. Then we check to see if they have open DMs on Twitter just in case.