Reclaiming Email for Ourselves
Whilst I was browsing the Kagi Small Web, which has become a bit of an escape of late, I came across a blog post which got me thinking.
It talked about sending emails to each other, out of the blue, like we did in the old days.
Where did we go wrong?
The post sums the current state of affairs pretty well.
If I open my email inbox right now, I see two things. The first is my abject failure to achieve inbox zero, writ in 72-point bold-face Impact. And the second is a massive pile of newsletters, purchase receipts, tracking information, and marketing emails. [Evie Fae] (https://ev-fae.quest/send-email-out-of-the-blue/)
I briefly talked about my first trans-Atlantic email exchange in a previous post, but like the old internet I never really stopped to think about how the use of email shifted from a joy to an inconvenience.
The old internet was a mostly open affair. You didn’t need to login for very much, save perhaps a chatroom or messaging client like ICQ or Yahoo!. Once your modem had completed the squawky two-step with your ISP, the world was your oyster.
It would be remiss of me to not mention the classic Tom Hanks & Meg Ryan movie from this formative era, You’ve Got Mail. It was this time when relationships were being formed over potentially vast distances. The world was suddenly getting smaller.
Now, the cookie infestation didn’t really begin until the mid to late 90s, so whilst we may have had an email address, it was mostly used for communication between ourselves.
Over time they gradually became our identities, our way to login to websites and a way for those websites to carpet-bomb our inboxes with marketing and spam.
There were of course other reasons to move away from email for communication –it is inherently insecure, unless you use an encrypted service like Proton (referral) or Tuta or manage to figure out how to configure your existing provider or client to handle the encryption key. There are messaging apps like Signal or Threema which offer the means to message people privately and with little fuss.
The thing is though, email is universal. Chat apps are invariably a walled garden which only let you chat with other users on that platform. It doesn’t matter who your email provider is, it can receive email from any other email provider.
Is it too late to reclaim email for the joy of communication? Or is doomed to be the place for spam, website logins and work tasks with impossibly short deadlines? I don’t think so.
Just like bank accounts, you don’t need to live with just one email address. I have a number of different accounts on the go, each with a different purpose.
I use the hide-my-email feature built into my password manager for the mailing lists and the logins for websites I don’t completely trust –usually those band merch websites. If any one of them misbehaves I can cut them off in a heartbeat.
I have email addresses for the more important logins; addresses for the really important stuff, plus a few spare addresses for different eventualities.
Of course, I have one that I can give out to chums if they ask for it. I’m holding out hope that one day we’ll fall back in love with email once again, one day when we break down the walls big tech has built around us.
