Email is good.

This seems like the nuclear option! Your email is so out of control that you literally give up and start over completely fresh. This might be fine for Beyoncé, but her success seems a little more locked in that yours or mine. 

This also seems awful dangerous to me. How many people are going to continue to send emails into the ether after you’ve made the switch? How many left hanging who already have? How many bills you’ve forgotten to pay lost in there?

Setting up an autoresponder telling people you’ve changed it is a possibility, but then what are you gaining by switching at all? 

The way I’ve seen it most commonly done is to essentially split your email. You create a new one that is your new squeaky clean email universe. Perhaps you email all the most important people in your life to tell them about it, and some small percentage of them notice and care. But then you also keep checking your old email address, because of course important stuff still pops up in there. The fix has become more work than the solution. 

Without having done any deep research here, I’d suggest not going nuclear with a new email. Fight that fight and clean up that existing email so it’s useful to you again. It’s a battle of unsubscribes and even filtering if necessary, but it can be done and you’re left with a stronger email history. Remember it doesn’t have to be done overnight.

It’s like a publication on the web. When they want to make big changes, they make big changes to the site they already have, they don’t get a new URL. Too much SEO value with the old one. 

Everybody is getting pounded with emails from apps that are changing their privacy policy or doing things like re-validating their marketing email lists. But I think I’ve read more joke tweets about it than actual emails!

I’ve been using Mailplane for a long time. It’s just a wrapper for Gmail/Inbox, which is perfect. That’s what i like, web clients with native wrappers.

The Inbox tabs I use have been broken all morning. I figured it was something funky with my internet or VPN, but it turns out it’s straight up broken.

It looks like Google Inbox stopped working in browsers which don’t support a new technology called “Service Workers”. Feel free to let them know via their “Send feedback” functionality. The more reports they get the more likely it will get fixed, if it wasn’t by intention. We’ll try to find a way around it but we can’t make any promises yet. I’m sorry but in the meantime we can only suggest to either use Gmail in Mailplane or Google Inbox in your default browser.

So they use a browser rendering engine internally that doesn’t support Service Workers. I guess that’s a little scary since the support for Service Workers is pretty broad.

Boxy 2 is broken too, as it must use the same rendering engine.

Good news: Shift is also a native app Gmail wrapper, and is based on Chrome, so it’s working fine. Plus it supports extensions, so if you’re a fan of stuff like Grammarly, like me, that’s a big step up.

I’m hoping I love Shift because I’m switching right now.

Seems like a natural fit, right? What better data set than decades of email complete with meta data?

I would think that spam filtering may have been one of mankinds first foray’s into machine learning. My Google-based email has been saving me from spam for a decade. We know that spam evolves to fight the machines that keep it down, and yet the machines seem to be winning. Certainly that’s some form of machine learning and not entirely human hand written filters.

We also have some evidence in the form of Gmail’s tabs (the Promo Tab, et al) which attempt to sort your email by type. And Inbox’s bundles which attempt to intelligently group your email types. That reeks of machine learning. Anthony Dm. has done some home-grown work in this area as well.

Today I wondered what would happen if I grabbed a bunch of unlabeled emails, put them all together in one black box and let a machine figure out what to do with them.

Google outright tells us this is the technology they employ. Although this research paper is about more fancy things like improving email search using actual behavior:

we leverage implicit feedback (namely clicks) provided by the users themselves. Using click logs as training data in a learning-to-rank setting is intriguing, since there is a vast and continuous supply of fresh training data.

There is even a company that is focusing on this entirely! Knowmail.

We’ve heard you hate email, so we fixed it!
Personalized artificial intelligence to help you focus on things that matter most, do more with less effort, and balance work and life.

Fascinating stuff.

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.

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.

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.

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?