Email is good.

A blog ostensibly about email productivity by Chris Coyier who you can email, obviously, at chris@coyier.com

  • Fastmail and coyier.com

    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 Report 2025

    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?

  • Recommended email providers

    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.

  • A list of things that Fyxer AI says

    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.

  • two.sentenc.es

    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.

  • TODO from Email

    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.

  • Email on NeXT

    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.

  • Hide My Email

    I was just chatting with Dave today about what a shit situation it is that there are some many companies that use dark patterns to subscribe you to marketing lists, or just straight up do it. You shouldn’t get emailed for life because you bought some novelty whisky glasses at a gift shop on vacation.

    I was a little more lenient that Dave was. I don’t mind a marketing email, especially if it was clear during checkout that was going to happen and I could opt-out. But of course if I unsubscribe later, it should be one-click and easy, which many companies fail at.

    The situation of getting marketing emails that are impossible to unsubscribe is horribly obnoxious and I’d bet one of the reasons people grow to hate email. There is no easy recourse for this. You can “mark as spam”, which may or may not help. Beyond that, you’ll have to set up an email filter to stop them, which is a step most will never do. (I think it’s worth doing.)

    But there are other technological solutions, including being proactive up-front. One-off emails is one such solution. Joshua Wold reminds about Apple’s iCloud feature for this:

    … instead of trusting this company, I used Hide My Email and iCloud auto generated a new one-off email address for me. 

    As expected the first email popped into my inbox, cheerful, stummed to the brim with marketing, and ready to beg me for money. 

    I gave them a chance and unsubscribed. 

    They did not honor my request, of course. A day later another email popped in, as pretentious as ever. This time I was able to take back a little control. I went into iCloud and disabled that temporary email.

    If you aren’t into Apple doing this for you, there is always that trick with the + sign in Gmail, in case you happen to use that.

  • How to build emails which look good when images are blocked

    Pretty nice exploration from Adrian Young on what kind of technical things you can do in an HTML email as a fallback when images don’t load.

    I got a kick out of the table-based “mosiac” fallback.

    Which there is a tool to help build if a pure pixel grid is what you’re after.

    The answer is basically use text for as much as you can (don’t make an image just for styled text) and when you have to use an image, use alt text and style it to look nicer when the image fails.

  • AI-Created HTML Emails

    Not, like, replies to your emails, which is a whole topic I’d like to dive into one day, but crafting a new HTML email that you’d send for, whatever, business reasons probably.

    Saw this, which is a pretty decent domain name I’d say:

    https://new.email

    So type in some email you want it to make:

    create an email that is very basic text with nice typography and underlined text links that invites people to a birthday party for a goldfish.

    And it gives you…

    I did a few more prompts but for the most part all the emails just look like that. Fine I guess?

    But the output is only React, plus TypeScript, plus a package called react-email, plus Tailwind. That part, to me, was like uhhhhhh why? How many people are building HTML emails like that? It’s a fine way to do it, but it seems like just giving us the HTML would be tons more flexible and useful. (You could just snag the HTML out of DevTools though, to be fair.)

    It all comes together as the company behind the React package is Resend, an email sending company, who also make new.email. Resend has integration with stuff like Next.js, so that’s the stack where you could actually grab and use these templates. So it’s developer marketing really. Fine I guess?