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I hate email. In maybe the last 5 years I've gotten maybe 5 emails I've appreciated. Heck, the number of emails I've gotten from real people probably isn't much higher than that anyway. I'm sick of it. I give up. Death to email.
I don't really check my personal email (until I have "urgent" paperwork to do, mother fuckers on email always giving me work I have to do). I'm fortunate enough to need to check my work email. Everything happens on Slack. Sure, Slack kinda sucks too, but it's a lot nicer than email. At least, on my fancy new work machine that can handle it. I would probably hate having to use slack a lot more on my own computer.
I keep having to sign up for apps, they keep needing my email. Invariably their unsubscribe is broken. I've tried so many things, to make email less painful. Automated rules, mark as spam, using +alias's, mass unsubscribe clicks. The only effective strategy is have a separate spam email. Maybe I should go back to that. I'm on the verge of using LLMs to categorize partially important things, and emails I've previously received from the sender. But why? There's no joy in email anymore.
I tried to make email more joyful! I regularly send FutureMe's to myself. I tried to email one human I knew from the internet a month. I subscribed to a couple mailing lists. (Not newsletters. Fuck newsletters. Give me an RSS feed, or I won't follow you). It's overwhelming. I didn't understand the culture on the mailing lists. The human emails were lovely, but conversation peters out. Necro-posting emails is a no-no, and the activation energy for a new one is fairly high. It did feel like a bonding exercise for this reason, but not necessarily a repeatable one.
I tried multiple clients. I configured neomutt to be fun to use. Fastmail's web app is surprisingly excellent these days (See, I can like proprietary webapps!). I didn't quite get the hang of keeping Thunderbird open, and it takes a long time to boot up.
Sure, I'll still have to use email. To sign in. To do my taxes. Maybe I'll be lucky enough to contribute code through email, wouldn't that be something.
But until then, I'm done with email. I'd love if you sent me a beautiful personal email. But I don't know when I'll see it. I'll certainly respond. But the part of me hoping that email would become cool again is dead. I hope email dies. I hope one day I will no longer need it.
