Using email wrong
arne.me
arne.me
When I changed my perspective on email in this light, I started to really see who were the delegators and who were the experts. As you might imagine, the delegators don't typically do much and the experts are usually doing it all.
You can then strategically ignore email and when experts come asking for help, you know it's something impactful. Same applies for delegators, but you typically view them as lower priority as they usually aren't impactful at all from your perspective.
Inbox Zero requires you to seriously think and evaluate every single email, but my way allows me to subconsciously triage.
And I just realized why it's so effective and feels so effortless -- it uses a mental mechanism that we all must use everyday, unfortunately; it's the same filter that lets us ignore advertising (e.g. billboards), which we've all had to practice anyway.
(This was the philosophy at a Scandinavian firm I worked at).
A more-experienced employee might want to delegate some of their less important tasks to less-experienced people, so that the former can focus on more important higher-value tasks.
If a more-experienced employee with more pay is doing a task that can be done satisfactorily by a less-experienced employee with lesser pay, that means the organization is spending more than it should to get that task done.
Of course, there are some assumptions here:
* The less-experienced is able to do the work with quality.
* The less-experienced wouldn't take an insanely longer time up complete the task than the more-experienced senior.
(Now please don't start a war here saying that everybody should have identical pay and there must not be any hierarchy whatsoever. It's beyond my control.)
Only answer directly if it really burns (aka you are responsible) or it is answered in a sentence.
All other things come later.
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I have, through my career, managed, directed, employed, mentored MANY people that were WAY smarter than I am (Looking at you JDB) -- but I had "mortar skills" -- oor as i call them "Lego Skills"
I am talented in bringing disparate engineering disciplines together.
Ill give you a real world example ;
Brocade.
I was the TPM on the build of their new HQ in San Jose, I was responsible for literally the entire go-live of collapsing all offices and data-centers down to the new HQ (I have dont this with other companies, including ILM, Facebook, Lockheed)
Its kinda my jam....
anyway, there were teams Server, storage, network, app, HR, blah blah not to mention the relocation of ~60,000 devices from colos in the valley to the new 4-storey DC building made at Brocade's HQ campus...
I was brought in because I knew how to gather the data req'd to inform an actual migration strategy.
---
I met with each SME of every discipline, asked them of their needs, inputs, workproduct, team, etc...
I did this with each SME for each discipline separately.
I then formed a plan of action, both tactical and hypothetical.
Once I had a plan together, held a meeting and showed the cohesive plan, with every teams dependencies and I threw that up on the wall and had all the SMEs in a meeting and asked them
"Tell me what is wrong with this plan. Show me any deficiencies that your team may suffer, and what is also needed from the other teams to make YOUR team successful. Throw as many darts as you can at THE PROBLEM and not the people on the other team."
A flawless move of ~4,000 employees and ~60K devices to a new colo with ZERO downtime to regular employees.
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So, just know that just because youre not an SME in a deep subject, delegators have value. In my case : I was not an expert in ANY of their fields, but I knew how to tie a team together in a way that was less divisive. Super successful and I allowed each SME to air their project issues and requirements in private, so as to keep emotions to a min. Esp considering prior to my joining the project, they had not been talking cross-teams at all.
Delegation is a skill -- you need to know enough about the problem (both project and team issues) to be effective, and really what it comes down to, is ensuring that your SME stays focused on being an SME for [SUBJECT] and remove the Human Emotional friction that can happen on teams of really smart people.
Thanks for the posts
Especially on teams.
In sports, a pass is a delegation.
Github "confirmatory 2fa" is an example. If I could, I'd turn it off, but there's no option for that (There's only an option to turn it "fully" on. hah!).
I had been redirecting github emails to my preferred folders, but then when the 2fa email came up, I had to spend 5 minutes tracking it down, because only the inbox sends notifications on my phone. So I reluctantly removed the rules, and now it litters my inbox by design.
I hate 2fa with a passion.
You enable notifications from Uber/UberEats/whatever because it's useful to get notifications like "the driver is on the way", "the driver is here". But then they also send you spam notifications.
And at least on iPhone, I don't know of a fast way to toggle notifications for a given app. Endless-scrolling the list of all apps in the notifications config menu is annoying enough to where I never bother.
My carrier (Telcel MX) does this too. They send important messages about my subscription on the same channel they spam me with offers. They even send me warnings about phishing attacks from fake Telcel ads. Well, maybe people wouldn't be so susceptible to it if you didn't train them to get used to ad spam.
In the notification screen, drag the notification left and hit "Options". It'll give you options to mute, turn off, or fine-tune the settings.
Specifically, for any who haven't noticed, there are several additional email addresses in most emails you'll receive if you're watching Github Repos, and you can filter on these:
https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/managing-subs...
So I have a series of filters for several of those emails, like "If 'mentions' in CC'd put in important folder", plus some filters for "If '[reponame]' in title, put in dedicated folder". And then all other github emails go to some other folder, and never my inbox. (That all said, I may be completely misunderstanding you; as I don't think I deal with "comfirmatory 2fa emails)
When you set up the device and GitHub showed you a handful of codes and said "don't lose these they're important" you kept them, right?
> Authenticator transfer hell
I've switched my primary TOTP device twice in the past few months and I have no idea what you're talking about.
- Use a 2FA app with sync like Authy (even Google Authenticator has basic backup/export support nowadays, but it's still far too easy to lose your codes with it)
- Use a password manager with 2FA support like KeePassXC/1Password/Bitwarden
- Use a YubiKey (ideally have two in case you lose it)
https://glockapps.com/isp-feedback-loops/#:~:text=ISP%20Feed....
My inbox is my to-do list. If there is an email there, a follow-up action is required. This means that I'm militant about archiving any email that doesn't need to be in my inbox. I've been doing this for at least ten years.
Since last year, I also use Abine's Blur for creating virtual disposable email addresses. (Basically iCloud Hidden Emails before it was cool.) these email addresses forward to my actual email addresses and can be replied to. Everything that asks for emails that could become noisy subscriptions gets a Blur email. If the emails get insanely spammy, I delete the email address. Spam over.
I also have a few email aliases for things like bills, receipts, invoices, etc. Since approx 2.5 years ago, these forward to an email that forwards those emails to Expensify. I also have spend alerts set up with all of my credit card companies and bank accounts, so anything I don't get receipts for also gets sent to Expensify. Subsequently, I have a detailed record of all of my budgeted and unbudgeted expenses broken up by week.
But it never works for me. I keep coming back to Inbox having three priorities:
- unread (must be triaged immediately - scanned then archived, starred, or left as normal read)
- starred
- read
Most of the time I sit at somewhere between 0-5 emails. If I'm having difficulties or overwhelmed, that number may grow substantially temporarily.
What I love about emails is that no ads are pushed into it, one of the few places where you can read information without Javascript and decide when and if to load external content.
I think innovations should be welcome, but they should have their own name and avoid considering a legacy system wrong by default.
Reinvent the wheel is hard,however I hope to see something great in the future (gpg for everyone for example).
I pretty much always opt for email notifications as opposed to some proprietary system - this allows me to decide what to do with them (including turning them back into a push notification by using something like Pushover, while the official app's push is disabled because they mix in marketing spam with useful notifications) even when the sender would rather not have me do that.
Believe it or not, I receive more spam than non-spam email each month.
Wouldn't that be classified as spammy ads from a valid message (when done using dark patterns with no one-click unsubscribe option)?
Recently, I gave my email address when having my car serviced. The next day, I received an email from Sirius XM, because the shop has a partnership trial deal with Sirius. I marked that email as spam, because it was entirely unrelated to any legitimate use for which I had provided the email address. That it was being sent by a legitimate company doesn't change the fact that it was spam.
The only exception I found was the democratic party mailing list. No idea how I even ended up on that as I don't live in the US, but NEVER give them your real/main email address. The spam is relentless and impossible to block because they are continually setting up new domain names.
When a new ad campaign occurs, they create a new "list" and mail everyone again.
This is spam.
I filter emails like the article suggests, just a bit more detail.
Newsletter, notification, and work are my main tags.
Then I have some specials like tax office, banks, crypto, academia, etc.
Most of it gets archived right when it arrives.
At bussy times, I have like 20 mails in my inbox for 1-2 days, but most of the time my inbox is empty or had under 5 mails.
I also treat these mails as tasks. Everything in my inbox needs to be tended to, and when it's done I send a reply or archive it.
Works like a charm for over a decade now.
Works like a charm for over a decade now. (But I don't get aneurysms when other people handle it differently.)
I also get one when I see people having open more than 5 browser tabs at a time.
Guess, I'm just not good at handling masses of information visually.
Come to think of it, it is quite amazing that good software supports so different styles of usage...
The better solution is to make a whitelist, and only let that in. Then have a convenient means to let people put themselves on your whitelist. And an even easier way to kick them off your whitelist.
One solution: http://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2018/Sep/solving-my-email-proble...
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18100807
Sieve filter to put it in folders derived from the name (you can do this dynamically, no need to put every address in there). Now you're playing with power.
For the first time in decades I feel in control of my e-mail again.
I saw your whitelist approach before, got a bit inspired, and considered doing the same thing but never got around to it because it seemed like too much of a hassle (it needs to have not only a separate running process but also maintain persistent state). Funny how perceptions differ.
While both share some benefits I think they're somewhat orthogonal. Your approach mostly works for humans mailing you individually (as you noted) while the biggest benefit for mine is for group- mass- and automated e-mail.
IMO the golden thing would be to combine them, only using the whitelist for a subset of addresses you actually use for personal comms.
Well my original idea was to have a unique email address for each person. So I needed a way to generate one on the fly. But now that you mention it, a catch all would have worked - I could generate the email even after giving the person his/her unique address.
Still, there would be some burden to actually create those custom email addresses every time I meet someone new.
The other side of the coding would be to ensure that when I email someone, the From/Reply-To addresses are the ones for that person. But what if I need to email 2 different people?
For me, having a single email address for family/friends wouldn't work - it always gets leaked somehow.
I’ve got tens of thousands of emails in my inbox, even after filtering, and, at my age, I simply don’t want to spend an hour a day pawing over email. I just let it recede into the past. If someone pings me about something I “missed”, I can always dig up their email.
I have no VIP email in my inbox.
Wait, you have "no VIP email in your inbox" -- where does the VIP mail go?
I have no VIP mail in my inbox, because I processed it. And that’s nice.
Edit: I should add that FM has a switch to only show VIP mail in the inbox.
Is this really a problem? I've had my email address for years, am active in the tech industry and have hundreds of accounts set up with that address, and yet I get near-zero spam.
The vast majority of services support opting out of marketing emails and respect that, those that don't are rare and can be dealt with an email rule, GDPR complaint, or both.
On average, I probably get a single email per day that actually lands in my inbox, and those are emails I actually want to receive.
For me, marketing emails is spam - even if I signed up for it. Often you need to sign up temporarily to access a service, and their signup option doesn't always let you specify what types of emails you want to receive.
> and can be dealt with an email rule, GDPR complaint, or both.
Both take more effort than a simple whitelist based system. I simply press a keystroke and the address is out of my whitelist.
I also can now sign up for anything if I need to and never have to put in any effort to prevent it from hitting my inbox. When you step back and think about it, it's hard to recommend "Really think whether you want to sign up, and later unsubscribe/set an email rule" vs "Sign up, and don't worry - it'll never go to your inbox."
For most of my email life, I followed your route: Be careful about what I signed up for, and spend time filtering/unsubscribing. When I switched to whitelists, it was just so much better. Of all the things one has to deal with in the world, spending time tending to the inbox is just wasteful.
In the last day, I received 14 emails. 2 were personal. A few were alerts I've set up (e.g. credit card spending exceeding X amount) - I wouldn't want to lose these, but I also wouldn't want them in my inbox. The rest were for things I signed up for because I needed to buy something but did not offer an opt out option while signing up. I'm not going to spend any time unsubscribing from them.
- All email goes directly to a PROCESS folder - Emails you have responded to or in your Contacts get processed by Rules/Enter Inbox - Allow/Deny context for individual or entire domain - Display sender domain prominently - Display TLD in alert before following any clicked link - Block link clicking, images, etc. from unapproved contacts
Now you are left with seeing only the things you approve of, unless you make a willing choice to go and view the Wild West of unapproved senders. Once trained, it's easy to see that you don't often get unsolicited messages you are interested in.
This should be easy to do, but no provider I've used has made it the default. I've had to cobble together my own solutions to make this work.
That rule has a few exclusions. For example, incoming emails from a handful of particular universities and companies I work with can go to "Inbox" because seeing them ASAP is likely important.
I believe hey.com provides this. Some years ago I did find a few other obscure providers with this service. Here's another one: https://www.spamarrest.com/features/
My approach is to make custom rules for the most frequent emails based on sender and subject (the paper trail type emails often have predictable subjects). What's left is between 5 and 10 emails a day that I can sort manually.
When I worked at some MSP I forwarded an email to the team lead and walked to his desk to discuss some things about that email.
When I asked if he saw the email from me he just showed me his Outlook littered with bazillion messages and my email wasn't even on the first page, despite the time I need to walk to his desk was minuscule - we were sitting in the adjacent rooms.
After seeing that and the look of despair in his eyes I asked him to allow me to look what exactly was spamming his address so hard. It turned out what the bulk of it was the automated messages from a various monitoring tools and tons and tons of CCed messages, because corporate bureaucracy and the team lead "should be in the loop", duh.
So I took my time to write a proposal to reorganize all that shi^W mess.
We had a couple of pretty big clients which we supported and we had a couple of teams in our organization supporting different roles (server/hardware, SAN, virtualization, networking etc), so I proposed the creation of a bunch of mailing lists/groups (we were using Exchange from the parent company) with an address split by the role and the client abbreviated name (2-3 letters): $role.$client@msp.tld, ie:
hw.CL1@msp.tld, san.CL1@msp.tld, monitoring.CL1@msp.tld etc and
hw.2CL@msp.tld, san.2CL@msp.tld, monitoring.2CL@msp.tld and so on.
Of course it took some time to implement (especially changing the addresses in the various automation tools), but after that and with the help of some pretty basic Outlook rules to sort out the messages to the corresponding folders the usual 1100+ messages per day in the team lead's Inbox dropped to less than a 100.
*note, this requires a speedy client where you can see a good number of subject lines and main body at the same time and just kind of arrow down quickly; I switch variously between mutt and thunderbird. I don't know how people deal with stupid bloated behemoths like today's Outlook.
They also provide a Sieve server. This is important.
If you use built-in Thunderbird filtering, then it only runs when mail is delivered to Thunderbird; and unless all your clients have the same filtering rules, then things could get messy. With Sieve, the filtering occurs on the delivery server; so it happens before you start your client.
If you use a webmail service with filtering, that also occurs on delivery, and server-side. But Sieve is great if you want to run a proper mail client.
The Sieve rules notation is a pain; but you can use Roundcube as a Sieve rules editor - it provides a nice interactive form-based rules editor, so you don't have to remember the rules syntax.
But it's still a time & attention tax you have to pay every day. Implementing rules based on sender & subject would be a one-off task and should cut that down dramatically and have a lasting impact.
In my case I probably have a hundred rules or so for any automated crap, and now I only get on average one email per day that makes it into my inbox and in the vast majority of cases it's an email I actually want to receive (and if not, it gets flagged and left there until I have time to set up a rule, unsubscribe from the list or send a GDPR complaint).
- Paced Email (https://www.paced.email) - you make special email addresses that will collect all the emails you have, and release them at the specified frequency (e.g. once a week on Friday evenings). I use this to make newsletters not interrupt me throughout the week. I often will do one pass where I just triage all the stuff that shows up in my paced emails, and then actually consume that content/respond to it at leisure afterwads. - Mailman (https://mailmanhq.com/) - it withholds all emails except those from "VIPs" to be delivered at specified time slots, by default 3 times a day, so that you don't get interrupted by unimportant emails. Additionally, they're working on a Paced Email-style product to release emails at intervals.
A couple major downsides of Mailman vs Paced Email is that you need to trust Mailman with access to all your emails, and it only works with Gmail; whereas Paced Email is opt-in via special email addresses which you can configure via separate DNS, and isn't vendor-specific. But it is more all-inclusive regarding wholly controlling your email cadence.
Also, while somewhat expensive, I do find that Superhuman does make it easier/faster for me to both sort and burn through emails, which makes coping with the volume of emails much easier. I use filters to sort my emails into separate buckets to get around the issues that other commenters have with company email addresses being overloaded for both important and unimportant use cases.
I've come to view handling email as 80% about quickly triaging them - ignore/unsubscribe/silence anything that isn't important, snooze anything you can't/don't want to handle now, then handle everything else efficiently.
Instead of categories, assign an attention budget.
It was a huge step forward for me when I switched from Outlook to GMail. Outlook originally did not group emails at all. Each message was a line item on its own, sorted by date sent. So even individual replies back and forth were scattered across my Inbox. Then GMail grouped all replies into a single line item, as a "thread" or "conversation", which I could then expand. Eventually Outlook followed suit, although at first imperfectly. It grouped by Subject instead of the more accurate email header, Message-ID. (Actually I believe this technique predates GMail, at least in one text-based email reader, Mutt.)
I think email should take this one step further, and group messages first of all by sender, then by thread.
sender (or recipient group for emails with more than one recipient, like SMS clients do)
|- thread
|- message
Facebook would also be better this way. Collapse posts by poster, so that people who post 5 times a day don't take up more of your news feed than those who post just once every now and then.
I don't think I'm using email wrong.
Unrelated: what is controversial about Basecamp?
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406673/basecamp-politic...
It only becomes a major issue when I want to find an email from a real person. It’s amazing - every marketing email seems to come up on every search I do almost like they’re keyword stuffing.
If there’s a better way to do it that doesn’t involve obsessive inbox 0 protocol but what the OP describes is what I’ve mentally decided to do as well.
I actually used to use a separate email address at Yahoo to handle all the ecommerce cruft but I find that Google does a good enough job of organizing that I don't bother any longer.
It's also not a bad idea to go on an unsubscribe mission every now and then.
Too many emails? Even in the "from a human, directly to me" category? Select all, mark as read, archive. If it's important enough it will come back.
Ideally, do this in conjunction with unsubscribing from the associated list and/or create rules so that automation takes care of future emails of that kind.
It might take you a few hours but in exchange you'll get back a usable inbox that will remain usable in the future thanks to the rules you set up.
How often are we allowed to do this before it becomes rude?
At the point you "declare email bankruptcy", you are probably already missing and not responding to emails. Rude or not, it's already happening. email bankruptcy is an attempt to keep it from continuing to happen, like it will if you continue on the course you are on.
I want to try the custom domain thing eventually, but will have to be careful not to let my domain get into the wrong hands. So I will be turning on 2FA on my registrar, and stay away from ccTLDs that have reputation issues (like .ru for example). Also I will ensure the domain keeps getting renewed. The only caveat is if I DIE someone can reclaim my domain and get access to all my accounts, which is worrying.
Hadn't thought about what happens to this setup when I die. Probably the simplest thing to do is give someone I trust access to the account. Alternatively I wonder if there's a way to keep credentials in escrow, which can only be legally released to a named beneficiary on death.
Nobody can hurt you once you are dead.
If your email is me@mine.com, me+[anythinghere]@mine.com is a valid email address and messages sent to it and will end up in your inbox.
I tend to use specific aliases for services that send a lot of notifications (like me+amazon@mine.com) and generic ones (like me+archive@mine.com) for everywhere else (specially tools I am signing up for to try out, and I hate drip email campaigns they trigger)
You can then set up rules on your email service provider to automatically route emails to a sub folder, spam or archive based on the to address.
I use G Suite — I mark all emails from Amazon as read automatically (I still want to be able to search for them if needed), move most email to spam automatically, and move newsletters I really want to read to the inbox instead of updates and star them.
Oh, and you can also automatically respond with “unsubscribe” to stop receiving emails from services. Most marketing email services support this.
Fastmail has a feature to automatically sort mail with a "+" into a dedicated folder, so you only need to add filter rules for those addresses that don't support the "+" character.
You still can't ignore the filtered folders, though, as sometimes you'll receive a notification out of the blue from a service or a person that is time-sensitive. So I went back to one giant inbox and I now sort mail that doesn't have a "+" sign into a dedicated "Personal" folder. Have a few more filters for jobs, receipts, and other emails that will reliably generate mail I don't ever need to read.
INBOX - Everything that I'm OK with, else they are either unsubscribed or blacklisted at my @oinam.com (humans and non-humans).
I have my primary email (since 2005), work emails, and a few other project emails all on the same Apple Mail Client[1]. I also look at just two panes -- the mail list and the message window -- no toolbox, no nothing. Took some time but have learned all the possible keyboard shortcuts.
I follow the -- reply if I can do it quickly and within a few minutes, else flagged for scheduled email-time.
Newsletters that I want to subscribe to; are subscribed with the known formula of brajeshwar+source@gmail.com. I use Gmail just for newsletters and beta sign-ups, waitlists, etc.
https://cdn.oinam.com/img/oinam/brajeshwar-apple-macos-mail-...
I can sign up for services with plus signs and use the plus signs to do things? Does this work on Gmail? What other services does it work on?
Is this a well-known fact???
I've never heard of this. My mind is about to blow here.
I worry that bad actors might strip the plus parts out, but in a basically cooperative ecosystem, this seems like a really big deal.
I typically use the name of the service after the plus, because it gives an added bonus of knowing who is selling my address.
Most websites seem to accept plus addressing. But I haven't encountered an online banking service, for example, that accepts plus addressing.
Incidentally, it doesn't have to be a plus sign; other symbols can be used.
However, some services that you sign up for might reject email addresses with + signs in them.
With Gmail, one thing you can do is insert a period anywhere you want in your email address. For some reason they decided to ignore that character when matching incoming email to an account. That behavior isn't standard, but services you sign up for should never have a problem with it.
As far as I know it’s not standardized at all; it’s not in the SMTP spec. It’s actually annoying that some people assume this is standard because they can break functionality, like assuming foo+bar@ is the same person as foo+qux@ when it’s not guaranteed to be.
Subaddressing is standardized in RFC 5233 as a filtering signal.
Not all providers do this, but it's easy enough to check if yours does, just send an email to yourself.
I've found old school approaches such as https://www.spamgourmet.com/index.pl to solve this better.
Another tidbit (and this one is gmail-specific): dots are insignificant. Mail sent to x.y@gmail.com will arrive at xy@gmail.com
Email addresses can be quite complex (cough), what those may never have come across. See 6.1 in RFC822.
But its a great way to check out what banks and card processors use as metrics and what they data share, and you can find out when someone gets hacked or ignored marketing preferences to stay off mailing list. Oh and spam becomes a thing of the past without needing any 3rd party anti spam provider.
Think out of the box.
Groundbreaking!
Can you do this with aliases on the same email account? I guess it's possible, but less likely to be supported by a typical email client.
Something you have known for years may be new to someone else. Relevant XCKD: https://xkcd.com/1053/
I personally have a newsletters@example.com, buys@example.com and signups@example.com all automatically marked as read.
Resonates quite a lot more than one per sender as I tried for some time.
E.g.:
* inbox@custom.me -> me+inbox@gmail.com
(Assuming you are using a solution that gives you that level of control)
How do you filter on this? Do you use a CAPTCHA?
He then gives one of those separate emails to humans.
Companies he orders from gets another email address.
Social media companies get another one. Etc.
It is a little frustrating though, I’m sure gmail and most modern email services could do a very good job on a filter like this if they tried.