My (personal) email has become something that I look forward to checking every morning, thanks mostly to the small web. I make it a point to reach out to people after reading their blogs, and often times I’ll get a response after a few days. It’s refreshing to have actual conversations online with people at a slow pace. Conversations where people take time to respond, rather than just shoot out a few words in an IM. Email has led me to meet some really cool people from around the world! But the thing is, you have to be very purposeful in how you use email, otherwise it’s a terrible tool.
Email is bad by default#
Just like snail mail, capitalism has destroyed email. What used to be a method for having meaningful discussions, has had ads crammed into every single possible spot. Companies actually believe sending yet another sales newsletter filled with AI generated slop will make you part with your hard earned cash. It’s a damn shame, but it’s par for the course. We get something nice, a small amount of people enjoy it, it becomes more popular, companies ruin it.
That’s where being meaningful with your usage of email comes in. I personally use and pay for Hey email from 37Signals. This isn’t a sponsored post or some nonsense like that, and I’m sure there are similar services (such as Proton mail ), but I do really like this service. First off, since I pay for it, there are no ads in the UI. I’m someone that will go completely out of my way to avoid being advertised to. They also don’t sell your data to make a quick buck, train LLMs, or just in general make the world a worst place.
But the biggest reason I love Hey is that senders are blocked by default. You have to purposely screen and whitelist a sender. So any company sending me an ad? Blocked. Somebody actually having a conversation? Whitelisted. This means that everytime I check my inbox, I only see meaningful messages, which makes checking your email a joy. If only the USPS would let me do the same to my mailbox…
Anyways, that’s the post! As always, feel free to shoot me an email below!
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