Paul O’Brien

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’ve spent years working with email from pretty much every angle: building it into products as a developer, dealing with DNS and authentication, and doing the deliverability work that decides whether messages actually land. I’ve also worked on the marketing side — platforms, campaigns, list health — and I’ve been the person asked to choose providers and make the trade-offs make sense.

So I don’t think email is boring. I think it’s underrated.

Email is still a core part of how the internet works: logins, password resets, receipts, support, hiring, abuse reporting, and the day-to-day messages organisations depend on. When it works, nobody notices. When it fails, it fails quietly — and usually at the worst time.

This site is where I try to make email legible: not as a product category, but as infrastructure.

How I approach this

I like testing this stuff. I’ll pay for an email provider, move a domain, set up the DNS properly, run it for a while, and see what the experience is really like — not just the onboarding screens.

That includes email providers, privacy and security tools, forwarders, and transactional email services (the kind that send password resets, sign-in codes, and critical account messages). I’m picky, but I try to be fair: I’m looking for the real trade-offs, not a gotcha.

Instead of feature lists, I tend to focus on things like:

  • What a service is optimised for (and what it isn’t)
  • Defaults that shape outcomes over time
  • Deliverability, support, and failure modes
  • Privacy, control, and lock-in when you use a custom domain

A few good starting points:

If you rely on email professionally — as an operator, founder, engineer, marketer, or decision-maker — this writing is for you.

Pay for your email (my bias)

I’m a believer in paying for email, especially if it’s tied to your identity or your work.

Free email often comes with compromises you don’t feel until later: data collection, lock-in, weak support, or incentives that don’t line up with the user. Paying doesn’t magically make a service good — but it changes the relationship, and it makes it reasonable to expect better defaults, better accountability, and better long-term control.

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 push an alternative — it’s to surface the assumptions those systems are built on, and the trade-offs they expect you to live with.

Illustrations on this site are created or commissioned for editorial clarity.

Some posts include affiliate links, disclosed clearly where they appear. They help support the site, but they don’t influence conclusions, coverage, or rankings. You can read more in the Affiliate Link Disclosure.

What else I write about

Email is the core focus, but I also write about the things that sit around it:

  • Privacy and data protection
  • Spam, phishing, and abuse systems
  • Digital identity and account security
  • The tools people use to reduce risk (password managers, passkeys, 2FA, tracking protection)

It all comes back to the same question:

How do digital systems behave once they have to operate at scale — and who pays when they don’t?

Get in touch

Have a question, suggestion, or idea?

📧 [email protected]

You can also follow my work here: