thinking about email clients again...
The fundamental question I keep returning to is: why is it that I am pretty responsive over Mastodon, signal, WhatsApp, slack, mattermost but absolutely abysmal of email? some of it is the anxiety of corresponding with people but that can't be all of it. The intermixing of messages from humans expecting responses from me with notifications from services, newsletters, and spam all in one channel shuts my brain completely off and sends me into an anxious paralytic spiral...
I think that is a big part of why email is patently unusable to me. other forms of communication are just humans talking to me. email is humans and all kinds of other shit and sifting through the noise just to get to the signal (no pun intended) is apparently too much to ask of my tiny brain.
I'm a broken record at this point but the following things are rendered identically, treated equally, given the same level of importance, sorted only by date:
- food delivery update
- spam that got through the filter
- message from partner, urgent
- automatic domain renewal notification
- message from existing client, urgent
- newsletter I didn't sign up for
- cloud service maintenance notice
- message from friend with meme, not urgent
- unsolicited recruiter
it feels like trying to ride a bicycle on a road that is also meant for cars but also meant for 18 wheelers but also meant for tanks but also meant for monster trucks but is also full of pedestrians and babies taking their first steps also airplanes are landing on this road and it is full of snakes
@nasser unsolicited advice so feel free to just look the other way but a big win for me in terms of using my email at all has been unsubscribing from anything that'll let me and summarily deleting anything like a notification, same with sms spam. Don't open it don't archive it don't let it consume more than a second of your time scanning the sender and topic field. It'll be in the bin 30 days or whatever if you need it and can be as simple as swiping on your phone. "turning down the firehose"
@maxc appreciated but honestly I don't even get that far. just seeing my inbox flooded with cruft is enough to shut me down. the mere act of scrolling through and swiping to delete things makes me feel like I've been dead for a thousand years.
@nasser yeah it does absolutely suck
the point where nuke and pave looks appealing is the point where you've lost :(
@nasser why are the snakes even here!? nobody asked for snakes! they don't want to be here!