About Paul O’Brien
Hi, I’m Paul O’Brien. I write in plain English about email, privacy-first tools, and digital productivity — with a focus on calm, practical tech.
I write about email as infrastructure — not as a product category, but as a system that quietly underpins identity, trust, work, and risk across the internet.
Email is often treated as “solved” or boring. In reality, it is one of the most consequential pieces of digital infrastructure we still rely on every day. It shapes how accounts are secured, how abuse is handled, how organisations communicate, and how power is distributed between users and platforms.
This site exists to make those systems legible.
How I approach email
I focus less on feature lists and more on trade-offs:
- What email providers optimise for
- What they deliberately don’t
- Where privacy, usability, scale, and control come into conflict
Rather than asking “Which service is best?”, I’m more interested in:
- Why Gmail became unavoidable
- Why privacy-first email looks the way it does
- Why spam never disappeared — it just changed shape
- Why email support, defaults, and protocol decisions matter more than marketing claims
If you rely on email professionally — as an operator, founder, engineer, or decision-maker — this writing is for you.
Experience and perspective
I’ve worked directly with email systems, including large-scale sending, integrations, and inbox behaviour under real-world conditions. I’ve seen email fail quietly and expensively — through deliverability issues, abuse, misaligned incentives, and brittle defaults.
That experience informs everything here.
I don’t write from theory alone. I write from use, failure, and long exposure to how email behaves when it’s stressed.
Independence
I’m independent and not affiliated with any email provider.
When I write critically about Gmail, Proton, Fastmail, or others, it’s not to promote alternatives — it’s to surface the assumptions those systems are built on.
Some posts include affiliate links, disclosed clearly where they appear. They don’t influence conclusions, coverage, or rankings. This site is not a review farm, a growth experiment, or a content funnel.
What else I write about
While email is the core focus, I also write about:
- Privacy and data protection
- Spam, phishing, and abuse systems
- Digital identity and trust
- The social web and decentralised platforms
All of it connects back to the same question:
How do digital systems evolve once they have to operate at scale — and who pays when they don’t?
How this site is supported
Some links on this site may be affiliate links, particularly in tool reviews. If you choose to buy through them, I may earn a small commission — at no extra cost to you.
This helps support the site and keeps the writing independent. You can read more in the Affiliate Link Disclosure.
Get in touch
Have a question, suggestion, or idea?
You can also follow my work here:
🐦 X: @pwob
🐘 Mastodon: @[email protected]
🦋 Bluesky: @paulobrien.com
🌐 Social web: paulobrien.com/social-web