How I Think About Email

I first encountered email when the choice was basically three names: Hotmail, Yahoo, or Lycos. There were no productivity systems, no “inbox zero” debates — just messages flying back and forth, often packed with jokes and chain forwards that never seemed to end.

I became slightly obsessed.

Not because email was powerful, but because it felt personal. Direct. Quietly intimate in a way nothing else on the internet was at the time.

When Gmail launched — invite-only, with access codes being bought and sold — it felt like a genuine shift. Conversation view, a clean interface, and the idea that archiving was better than deleting. That one assumption changed how I used email, and it never really left me.

Since then I’ve been looking for better ways to use email — not because email is broken, but because most people never stop to think about what their inbox is doing to them.

On this page

• Email isn’t replaceable
• Email is how I think and work
• Control matters more than clever features
• Privacy is practical, not ideological
• The tools I use — and why
• What most senders get wrong about marketing email
• Owning your domain changes everything
• Why I write about email

Email isn’t replaceable

Social media has never replaced email, and it never will.

Email sits underneath everything: logins, receipts, notifications, subscriptions, long-form communication — identity itself. Platforms rise and fall. Email persists.

What frustrates me is how casually it’s treated, especially by younger users. My daughter once showed me her inbox with over 3,000 unread messages. Not because she didn’t care, but because email had become a dumping ground instead of a tool.

That isn’t a user failure.

It’s a design failure.

Email is how I think and work

I use email as a task list, a reminder system, a way to stay informed, and a way to talk directly with readers. It isn’t just communication — it’s part of how I organise my life.

That’s why bad interfaces bother me. Poor defaults create stress. Clutter hides what matters. And when email goes wrong, it doesn’t usually explode — it just drains attention, every day, in small and expensive ways.

I work towards inbox zero as much as possible — not as a productivity badge, but as a way to keep email usable.

Inbox zero, for me, doesn’t mean replying instantly or treating email like a to-do app. It means my inbox contains things that genuinely need attention, not an unmanaged backlog of noise.

Inbox zero isn’t about discipline.

It’s about design.

Control matters more than clever features

When control isn’t offered, people build their own layer. Tools like DuckDuckGo Email Protection exist because people want more than “receive everything” or “unsubscribe forever”. They want to sign up safely, reduce tracking, and step away from high-volume senders without touching their primary address — recreating the preference controls email should have had all along.

A lot of this comes down to incentives — something I explore more directly in Free vs Paid Email: What You’re Really Paying With, where I break down what changes when a service isn’t funded by a subscription.

One design decision I keep coming back to is unsubscribes.

Too many marketing emails offer a single blunt option: unsubscribe entirely. What’s missing are basic controls — reduce frequency, pause for a while, choose categories, or change how often you hear from them.

Most people don’t want to sever the relationship. They just want fewer emails, or different ones. When that option isn’t available, unsubscribe becomes the default — even when it isn’t what the subscriber intended.

Good email design gives people control, not ultimatums.

Because inboxes aren’t static. How much email you want changes with workload, context, and relevance. Systems that assume a permanent all-or-nothing decision push people towards disengagement rather than adjustment.

That idea underpins much of how I think about inbox design, email fatigue, and long-term trust — and why unsubscribe-only email design so often misses what subscribers actually need.

Privacy is practical, not ideological

I don’t use Gmail as my primary inbox anymore, largely due to privacy concerns — but I also understand why it remains dominant.

It’s fast, familiar, and deeply integrated into how many people live and work online.

Privacy, for me, isn’t absolutism. It’s reducing unnecessary exposure, understanding trade-offs, and choosing tools that behave the way I want email to behave.

That way of thinking naturally leads to ownership — whether your email address is something you control, or something you rent.

That’s why I currently use Proton Mail as my main provider. It strikes the balance I want: strong privacy protections, a clean interface, and features that don’t fight my workflow.

The tools I use — and why

I don’t use tools because they’re “the best”. I use them because they reinforce the behaviours I want from email.

• Primary inbox: Proton Mail — privacy, clarity, calm defaults
• Personal devices: MacBook Air and iPhone — where email feels deliberate: something I process, not something that constantly interrupts
• Work email: Outlook on a PC — which I initially disliked, but now understand. There’s a reason it dominates organisations, and I plan to write about that separately.

My relationship with these tools is shaped by how deeply I understand how email works.

In a previous life I was self-employed and built email tools and integrations for businesses. That’s where I learned how email behaves under the hood: DNS, SMTP, delivery, DKIM, SPF and DMARC — all the invisible plumbing people only notice when it breaks.

I’ve built and maintained marketing systems, worked with bulk sending, and used services like Amazon SES in custom integrations. That experience permanently changed how I look at email — especially when companies ignore established best practice.

Working that close to email also makes privacy and security impossible to treat as abstract. When you see how messages are routed, logged, filtered, and sometimes mishandled at scale, you stop thinking of email as “just messages” and start thinking in terms of exposure, metadata, and trust.

That’s why I care so much about defaults, data handling, and long-term control.

What most senders get wrong about marketing email

I have very little patience for marketing email that treats the inbox as a dumping ground rather than a place for considered communication.

That usually shows up as:

• Poorly designed messages
• No respect for frequency or relevance
• Treating email as cheap or disposable
• Ignoring long-established best practice

Email works best when it’s boring, predictable, and respectful.

When senders get it wrong, the damage isn’t dramatic — it’s subtle. Trust erodes. Messages get ignored. Engagement drops quietly.

Unsubscribe rates don’t tell the full story of disengagement.

Owning your domain changes everything

I’ve had more email addresses than I can count. I’ve switched providers repeatedly over the years, always searching for something better.

The biggest lesson I learned — eventually — is that owning your domain changes the balance of power.

When you control your domain, your address becomes portable. Providers can change. Tools can evolve. Your identity stays put.

Everyone should own their own domain. It’s one of the simplest ways to take long-term control of email — and it’s a lesson I learned the hard way.

Why I write about email

For most of my adult life I’ve been the person people come to with email questions: recommendations, troubleshooting, or just trying to understand why something isn’t working.

How people use email fascinates me. So does its history, its role in privacy and security, and the quiet ways it shapes how we communicate.

My goal is simple: to write thoughtfully about email and related services — not to chase trends, but to help people make sense of a tool they rely on every day.

If I could do this full-time, I would.

Until then, this page exists to explain where I’m coming from — and why email, when it’s done well, still matters.

More about me