My Inbox, My Rules

Update 17th Oct 2020: Their website is gone, and was never archived by the Wayback Machine. I suspect they gave up on trying to move Google, which was always going to be a tall order.

Today, I came across 98 Voices via Chris Coyier’s Email Is Good.

This amuses me on so many levels. The presumptuousness of these ‘thought leaders’ (good grief, I hate that phrase!) The continuing (un)helpfulness of Gmail. But most of all, the petitioning of Google to allow this app to reverse reality and declare promotional emails not-remotely-promotional-no-siree.

I receive a few promotional emails in my inbox. One of those is from Seth Godin, one of the 98 voices. I do get to see his emails, because a) I use FastMail, b) FastMail doesn’t enforce filtering of my inbox for me, c) I can do my own filtering, so I read it when I want to.

Added irony: the reason I’m subscribed to Seth’s newsletter is because his blog doesn’t have an RSS feed.

You probably won’t be surprised to hear, then, that I get a lot more insightful commentary from my RSS feeds than I do from my email inbox.

My inbox, my rules. If you think that you can dictate to me how I receive your message, you’re probably not going to stay on my radar. Sorry.