Email

Could I too start storing things as email and find them later using Notmuch?

I woke up from my trance and bailed on my disjointed bricolage of Fastmail->Gmail->Mimestream. Cobbling various pieces together just so I can use a single mail client on my Mac seemed…shortsighted. Mimestream is nice, but not that nice, you know? So I’m back in MailMate and/or Mu4e. Oh, and sometimes Apple Mail. But I’m thinking about switching back to notmuch from Mu4e. Now that I say it, I’m not sure this is any better :)....

Dammit I just lost an hour on Mastodon even though I’m supposed to be “off” social media. I have nothing to show for it, either. It’s insidious! I lost my head for a second and thought maybe I’d do the whole “Emacs from scratch” thing again. This time, I tried the new beta branch of Crafted Emacs because I like their approach on the new version. But yeah, it’s beta and things broke and I’m not good enough to troubleshoot....

I don’t get many emails these days. Nor do I send many. And yet, I spend an inordinate amount of time futzing with how I get and sent emails. I’m doing that thing again where I overthink my email process. The only hard requirement I have with email is that it uses my own domain name. Hence, jack@baty.net. Email is still the key to many things, so allowing someone like Google to control that key is a no-go for me....

Notes on using Mimestream.

Journal blog post format changes. Mimestream for email. Arq backup problems. Tweaking the PaperMod theme.

I use Notmuch in Emacs for managing my email. It’s fast, powerful, and (once used to it) easy to use. There are a few oddities I’ve learned to work around. The first is with deleting messages. The manual for Notmuch states: Notmuch does not support, nor ever will, the deleting of messages Notmuch manual I’m ok with this, since Notmuch provides a way to essentially bury deleted messages using tags. I don’t necessarily need to actually delete the message file....

TL;DR: I’m sticking with HEY for my email, but there’s a surprise twist: I’m also sticking with Fastmail. Hear me out. I was initially disappointed with the implementation of custom domains in HEY. You can read the whole almost-rant here, but the short version is that I thought I was going to lose both my @hey.com address and my access to HEY World for quick blogging. And it would cost me $20 more per year for the priviledge....

(Updated with notes about the custom domain discount) Other than having a couple of nits to pick, I really like using HEY! for my email. After considering the pros and cons and waffling between dropping the service and going all-in, I’ve been leaning toward all-in. HEY offers an opinionated, clever, and pleasant set of features that’s not found elsewhere. A big missing piece for me has been custom domain support....

My first annual subscription to Basecamp’s HEY email service is about to expire, meaning it’s time to decide whether I will be renewing. I don’t think I will. This makes me sad, because I really like using HEY for email. They’ve done a great job re-thinking how we interact with email and most of their decisions have been spot on. I forward baty.net email from Fastmail to my HEY account and, now that they support SMTP forwarding, I can reply from there as well....