798: The Email Overwhelm Problem
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Hello and welcome to Mac Power Users. My name is Stephen Hackett. I'm joined as always by my friend and yours, Mr. David Sparks. Stephen Hackett. How are you? I'm good. How are you? The show is therapeutic for me. And today in particular, because we're going to be talking about email.

And I have a journey to share. So yeah, it's good. It's good. I've been looking forward to this one. Yeah. This is one where you're like, Oh, I got the outline. You know, sometimes we share them. Sometimes one or another of us really takes the, uh, the lead. And this was like, no, I've got it. So I opened it a few days ago and I was like, wow, this has been, uh, this has been cathartic for, uh,

If there's such a thing as a Notion outline that is red strings and pins, that's what this outline is. In fact, Stephen said, I tried to sort it out for you, but I couldn't. And I'm like, that's okay. It is beautiful anarchy. We're going to have a good time on this one. It's got to be something. Oh, man. Today on More Power Users, which is the ad-free longer version of the show that we do each and every week, we're going to talk about the new CarPlay. After it was announced...

I don't know, 400 years ago. It is shipped on new Aston Martins. Three years ago. It feels like 400 years ago. Yeah. All right. And I have a question. Can I expense an Aston Martin? I don't know. Yes, you can. Okay. Well. I said it's okay. Could you send me that in writing, please? When the gentleman from the IRS comes over to say, Spark, you said it's fine. Yeah. I just. Yeah.

So we're going to talk about that for members. So members stay tuned at the end of the show. Email. Okay. So the very first episode of the Mac power users was about email. And that was a long time ago. And guess what? Email is still a thing.

It is. It has not gone away. You know, I was thinking about this. So many companies, including Slack, my company, we pay for Slack. We're going to replace email. And you know what? Nothing has. Like, can we just be honest about that? Nothing has replaced email. Not completely, at least. Yeah. I feel like, you know, some of these technologies have become useful for special circumstances. But

The idea of a digital mailbox is a good one, and it has survived the test of time. But the world has changed, and so email has to evolve. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. And one of the interesting things about this show is you and I are on opposite trajectories with email, and it vastly changes the way we think about it. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, it really does. I mean, my sort of topic one for me is my email use has actually been very stable and slowly decreasing over time. And so I thought I could start with my stability and then we can go into your chaos. How does that sound? Okay. Sounds good. Stephen Stabili title. So...

My start with my email account. So then we'll talk about the software I use and then kind of where I am with email sort of philosophically and workload wise. I am all in on Gmail and Gmail and its privacy. That's going to come up a lot. And people have strong feelings about it, which I totally understand. I would say for me, I'm OK with the tradeoffs.

And what I get for using Gmail is very valuable to me, including basically every email app supports Gmail, which we're going to talk about when we get to you.

And their search is fantastic. And their server side rules are also fantastic. And we've, we've talked about mail rules a lot over the years and, you know, Apple mail into Mac hasn't built in, but to use them, I got to have Mac mail running. And like, what happens if my Mac mini goes to sleep or the power goes out and my email rules don't work. So having them server side is really good. Apple's iCloud server side email rules are really pretty simple. I think they get the job done for a lot of things, but,

But Gmail's are incredible. You can do so many things with server-side rules. And so several years ago, I just was like, you know what? I'm using Google Workspace for work already at that point. I'm going to move to Gmail personally as well. So I have a personal Gmail account, which I got way back in the day when you had to have a friend with an invite. Do you remember those days? You had to be invited to Gmail. So my Gmail account is very old.

And then I have three Google Workspace accounts. So that's the branded Gmail. So I've got one for my Relay email address, one that I have that's Hackett.fm, which is like 512 pixels. And when I used to do freelance work, that's sort of like my other work bucket. And then it's what we use at Crossford, Underscore's company. And so I've got four Google accounts with email, and they all just kind of live side by side. And...

It's great. I like that they're all the same, right? That I have the same feature set across all of them is important to me. Yeah. With the Google workspaces, yeah.

a lot of the privacy concerns are less because they tell you when you pay us money, we stop using you as an index basis. So, I mean, that's what people don't like about Google. It's like, yeah, they're, you know, I'm not sure they're actually reading your email, but they could, and they're definitely indexing it for search results and ads, you know? So I remember my wife had a thing she worked on years ago

And she emailed a friend asking, well, we need to buy a certain type of container to do this thing. And then there was an ad that,

in the email reply with the container that they needed, you know, and that, that just creeped me out. So I, I have been historically kind of anti Google and something I didn't realize until we started working on the show. Cause I knew that you had moved, you know, relay into Google and your packet stuff. I didn't realize your personal stuff was there too. Yeah. So, um,

One reason I moved from iCloud email to Gmail personally was the spam filtering in iCloud mail, at least at the time, several years ago, just wasn't very good. And I felt like I was getting a lot of spam in my inbox that definitely would not have made it in Gmail. And that's another strong suit of the Gmail system is that their spam filtering is really good.

Yeah, yeah. That's kind of an interesting story, though. So now when you log in, how easy is it to switch between those three accounts? It's really easy. Google's done a really good job in one browser window being able to switch between those accounts. And even in like the Gmail app. So I have the Gmail app on my phone really for the search because as many times as Apple says they fix search in mail, they just haven't. Like it's just...

I know something's in there and it won't find it, which is really frustrating. And so in both cases, it's really easy to move in between them. Now, personally, I just don't do a lot of email on the web. And

And so I don't come across that very often. But if you are somebody who does and like you're not using separate profiles in your browser, you're just signed into both and you can just bebop in between them. The web does not give you a universal inbox, but the Gmail app on the iPhone and iPad do. So if you like that universal inbox, you can do that in their apps, but not online, which I think is a bit of a shortcoming. I would like to see that on Gmail on the web.

And, you know, the nice thing about Gmail is you don't need a hosting company. Everything is just in one place. And it does give you a lot of flexibility with other services and automations.

How much are you actually taking advantage, though, of those cloud-based rules? Like that to me has always been the attraction of Google's, like going nuts with server-side rules. Oh, so, so many. I was looking through my, particularly on my work accounts, having the ability to say, you know, email to this address or from this sender or with these words in them, file them, delete them, archive them, whatever it may be.

is super useful to me. I'm going to talk and I want to talk in a little bit about my how my email use actually decreased over the years due to some changes we've made to our feedback system at Relay. But one great thing about Gmail, this is true in other email systems, too. You can do like a plus and then something else and add that to your email. So it's like Steven plus MPU at Relay.fm. Like you could email me there.

but I can set a filter on that to go into a folder for like all NPU mail. And so having, having that ability to change what happens to a message based on a bunch of different, like a bunch of different types of data associated with that email is just really, really great. I do the same thing personally. So like,

Uh, any parents out there will know schools just send a lot of email and I have it automatically set to like, because our, our three different kids are at three different schools. Do not emulate that. It's, it's brutal. Um, I can have those things automatically go into folders for each of the kids. And if I see, I have an unread message in there that I can just go check it out and it's not in my inbox. So I'm using them. I'm using a lot of it.

All right. So like, for instance, I use with Fastmail, which I have on the company accounts, they've got great server side rules. Like I can make a rule. One of my favorites is because I use Readwise Reader. When stuff comes in from like Substack or like long form stuff, newsletters that I subscribe to,

I have a rule that forwards it to my magic read wise email marks. It is archived marks. It is red. So I actually never see it in an inbox, but it just shows up and read wise. Like you can do that stuff with it as well. Right? Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And I actually do that through feed bin, which we'll talk about in a minute. Like my newsletters don't even hit my inbox. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I have a link in the show notes to like the, the, how rules work in Gmail. Yeah.

Yeah. But you have filters on basically any kind of piece of data associated with an email account. So if I go in here and I'm looking at setting up a filter, I have who it's from, who it's to the subject, and then I have search, right? So like any email with the word David, you know, I could filter on that size of attachment has attachment doesn't have attachment. Yeah.

And then you can do basically anything with it. So you can archive it, say you want to keep it where it is, but just mark it as red or give it a flag. You can say, never send it to spam, which is useful. Sometimes if you need an email, like Gmail keeps thinking it's spam, you can tell it actually never sent this to spam. And what really, one of my favorite things about the Gmail system for filtering, I think fast mail does it this way too, is I can have an email selected and,

And I can say filter messages like this. And it pulls in some of that metadata about the message. So it's like helping you build the filter as you go, which is really handy. One thing I've always worried about with Gmail is that I feel like it represents a slippery slope. Like you start using Gmail and you're like, well, can I use Safari with it? Right. Like, like it does Gmail. Yeah.

work with Safari. I've always heard that, you know, Chrome is really the ideal browser for dealing with Google services. It's their browser, but I don't really want to run Chrome. It's not that great of an app. I know there's alternatives out there, but

Like, how do you deal? Like, do you, I guess, do you even find yourself going to use it on the web? I guess you already answered the question. You don't do that very often. I don't do it very often, but when I do, it's been perfectly fine. I use a lot of Google services, like Relay runs on Google Workspace entirely, like Google Docs and Sheets. Sheets in particular can be a little funky in Safari sometimes, especially big sheets. Like we have some like major invoice tracking spreadsheets that

Safari kind of struggles with sometimes if I'm doing a lot of heavy filtering. But at least in my use, Safari has been totally fine. Like in preparation for this, as I was spending more time with Gmail on the web and Safari, I never ran into something that seemed to not work the way it was supposed to. So I think that is generally much better than it was. You know, it may not be perfect. Like, you know, people who are only using email on the web, maybe they would

have a different take on that than I do. But for my, you know, admittedly limited use, it's been totally fine. All right. So this year, Apple introduced kind of, I'd say a little half-hearted filtering to Apple mail where you get, you know, and some people really hate it. Some people like it. Gmail has been doing that for a long time. Do you find it useful on Gmail? They're auto sorting stuff.

Yeah. So I actually have all of that off. So the thing of like, this is a promotion, this is a receipt. Yeah. Cause I tend to want to do that myself with the rules that I've set up or with SaneBox, which I'm going to talk about in a second. And so I never used that in Gmail now partially because I've always, I've mostly used it through mail apps. Like that wasn't really an option for me to use, even if I'd wanted to.

And so I have them off in mail on my iPhone. I don't find the machine categorizing things for me to be a satisfying experience. Yeah, but you said SaneBox, so you're using that with Gmail. I am. This is a disclosure that SaneBox is a sponsor of the show. I pay for it. I pay for it on all my email accounts. And it is... SaneBox has a lot of things. I basically use it for two things. I use it for...

the same black hole. So I get, as I'm sure you do, David, a lot of pitches. Like my email is on every PR list ever made. And I can drag those to spam, but then sometimes they come back or like, it's just easier for the same black hole as a guarantee. I'm never going to hear from that person again. So I use the same black hole all the time. The other thing I use a lot in same box is sane next week.

And so SaneBox has a lot of like, remind me of this in two days or three days. You can set custom ones. Next week is the one that clicks for me of like, hey, this is something I'm just going to deal with not right now. And so for instance, the other day I got an email about something I need to do with insurance and it's not due until like three weeks out. And so it's just in Sane next week. And so next week it'll pop back in my inbox and I can deal with it then. Like the end of this week has been very busy. I'm not going to get to it, but I don't want it in my inbox over the weekend.

So those are really the two that I use. Yeah. And I want to step up a minute and, and defend email deferment, which is what you're talking about. I, I made fun of it on the show when it first started showing up in places. I'm like, that's stupid. In fact, I think Google's the first company I saw do something like this, but it's like, so you're not going to deal with your stuff. You're just going to put it in the future and then you're going to read it again and

But now having used it for several years, that stuff is actually really useful. And because there's so much overhead to managing existing emails where deferment takes a moment and often you can defer an email just reading the header, not even opening it and knowing what you need to do with it.

And I'm with you. I think anybody who hasn't really tried that, some sort of email deferment who struggles with email, you should definitely look at that tool because it can make a big difference.

And SaneBox does it that way. They have like predefined ones with your account. And, you know, I think the defaults are one day, one month, one week. But you can, depending on how much you pay them, you can, you know, get really advanced with it. Yeah. And I've got SaneBox set up on my wife Mary's Gmail account. Yeah. And for her, the biggest uses are the SaneNews. I think that's probably the biggest one because she's like, I love my wife more than anyone in the world.

but her email hygiene is unbelievably bad. And she signs up for lots of things. I'm like, Oh, I wouldn't know if there's a sale at the store that I like. It's like, okay, like you and I cannot be more different in this area. I know. I know. Steven, I wait, same thing. Yeah. Same thing. And I got her same box account for her iCloud account. And it's just, I look at her saying news and there's a part of me that like dies inside. I just see the unread count there. It's like,

What is this? Yeah. Sorry. No, we're in the same boat, brother. And so I, uh, so I've said it for her and you know, the same news thing is what's best for her. It's like, Hey, if you get it on a mailing list, you want to keep drag it over here and they'll be there when you want them. And it stays out of your inbox, which is like a whole nother situation in her life. So, uh, same box lets you kind of pick and choose the features that you want. And, uh,

It can be really useful to manage things when things are stressful. All right. One of my favorite things about Gmail, one of the things that really tempts me about Gmail is the existence of MimeStream. Yes. We had Neil on the show back 742, not that long ago, about a year ago, I guess. And I kept bugging him about getting FastMail support. Still not there.

But I'm just saying that. I don't mean anything by it. I know that their iOS app is in private test flight, and I think Fastmail is probably next, if I had to guess. We've talked about it before, but explain why MimeStream is so good. It's, for now, a Gmail-only application on the Mac that takes advantage of a lot of the things that Gmail offers online.

but also is just a really good mail application. Really fast, really lean, very customizable. So you can say, hey, I want to use the shortcuts from Apple Mail or I want to use the shortcuts from Gmail because there are different sets of shortcuts. You can set up a lot of the things like vacation mode and inbox categories that Gmail has, but mail, because mail is servicing all sorts of accounts, they don't surface that.

are surfaced in MimeStream. So if I were into inbox categories, I could have those on and I could see them in MimeStream just the way they are on Gmail. I don't remember if Neil said this or not, but I think it's definitely true.

It seems like one of the things they really care about is offering as much of like the Gmail experience as they can, but on the desktop. So for instance, all those email rules I mentioned earlier, they're all accessible in MimeStream. Can you create them in MimeStream as well? You can create them and you can edit your existing ones.

It's really, really nice. And so it's not a perfect one for one, but it is very close in terms of if Gmail can do it and it's in the API, MimeStream supports it. And it's just a really nice, really fast app that doesn't seem to suffer from some of the issues that Apple's mail app has over time with various compatibility issues with Gmail or whatever.

All of a sudden, it just refuses to send email until you restart it. Like some of the weirdness you see in mail. Yeah. Mime stream is just very solid. And it's a subscription. My first receipt number for that was in the low double digits. Like I was very early to pay for mime stream and I cannot wait. Neil, if you're listening.

Put me on the iOS test flight. I'm a really good beta tester. That's not actually true, but I would love to see it. So hook me up. I can't wait. There you go. Can't wait. It's 50 bucks a year to subscribe to it. Yeah. Yep.

50 bucks a year to get out of the Gmail interface to me is probably a valuable proposition. Cause, cause I, you know, when we get to my segment, you know, I'm in a period of transition here and I am looking at Gmail and like, whenever I look at the Gmail interface, Steven, I, I hate it. I just look at it and it's just like, I don't know what it is, but it just does not look like a place I want to do email.

So I think I would have to have something like Mindstream if I were to do that transition. Now, does Apple Mail serve any role for you at this point? It has one job for me. So when we pay people at Relay, the receipts come to me. But Kathy Campbell is the one who does all that part of the bookkeeping. And we share an inbox for that sort of thing.

And so I need to move those receipts to that inbox. And MimeStream, despite my asking for years, does not let you copy messages in between accounts. It is, if you go to their roadmap on their website, I think it's still there. But so I have those two accounts set up in Apple Mail. And I, you know, a few times a month go in there and move a bunch of email from my inbox into the receipts inbox.

Because I know SaneBox has a thing where you can automatically download attachments to Dropbox or something. Have you looked into automating it that way? Well, they're not even always attachments. Sometimes if we do ACH wire payments, it's just in the email. So I've looked at a bunch of different ways to do it. I was like, well, I could do mail rules and forward them over there.

But then we make PDFs of them, like some of the forwarding. There wasn't a great way to do it. And so I'm still using Mail for that. So it's open a few times a month. And like the second Mindstream offers that, which I hope they do, I would retire Mail from it. It's one job for me. Although I do know people who use Mail as a way to back up their Gmail or their other

because mail.app by default downloads everything in your account and MimeStream does not. Like MimeStream is like using the API and the emails on the web. I don't really care about having a local backup of my email. Like I feel like Gmail's pretty safe place for my mail to be. Plus I run Google takeout like twice a year, their service where you can just get a zip of everything in your Gmail account. And so I don't worry about using mail as like a backup tool because

I think it used to be a bigger deal like in the pop mail days, but with IMAP and like good syncing, I just don't really worry about it. But I know people who run mail just for that sort of backup functionality, if you will. Yeah. I, having made now something like 800 episodes of Mac power users, I,

I will say not ever being a Gmail user, I can tell you with authority not to use Apple Mail with Gmail. And every time I say that, I get emails from people that say, Sparky, I've been using Gmail with Mail forever. It's no problem. But I also get email from people saying, oh, you're so right.

you know, Apple mail completely crunched me one day because I feel like Apple and Google just don't feel like sharing a bat phone about Gmail and Apple mail compatibility. And sometimes things just don't work. And if you're, if you've had a good experience, good on you. Glad for it. But yeah,

I can tell you, I got the receipts here. A lot of our listeners have just had a lot of problems. And for the longest time, I told people, if you're going to use Gmail, just use the web. That's the native experience. But MimeStream kind of changes that, right? It does. And even over the years, Gmail has worked better or worse with Apple Mail, depending on what's happened. So it's not surprising. Yeah. I'm not saying it doesn't work, but I'm saying...

Sometimes it doesn't work. Anyway, yeah, there's that. So, Stephen, you and email, how are you guys getting along? You know, you guys friends? We are. So over the years, there have been several things that have lessened my email load. A big one more recently is that, again, Kathy Campbell has taken over at least the first line of membership support at Relay.

And so that email address, membership at relay.fm, is a group in our Google Workspace account. And that group forwarded just to me. And then I could deal with them, archive them, whatever.

Yeah. But this actually started on my sabbatical last fall. I was like, Kathy, like very capable of doing this, has the bandwidth. And so I adjusted the group in Google Workspace to forward to her and to me. And now I have a Gmail rule just to archive those into or tag those into a folder and mark them as read. So I don't ever see them, but they're there if I need them. And so that's been great. And if she needs to escalate something to me, then we talk in Slack and, you know, I'll go dig up the email and deal with it.

And so that has lowered the volume of email quite a bit. Another change that we've made at Relay that has definitely helped is Relay's online feedback form. There's a link to it in the show notes every week. You can send us feedback or follow up on the web. And that initially was slated or kind of started life as a way to get feedback off of social media and it was something that we controlled. Yeah.

We built that sort of as a lot of our audience was leaving Twitter, which was like the way we gathered feedback for most of our shows since the beginning of time. And so having that on our own turf was really important. And the side benefit of that

which I didn't really understand at the time, but I've come to appreciate is that it also greatly decreased the amount of feedback email I got. There's still people who email us and that's great. Like that's how you want to get in touch, please. By all means. Um, I don't mind. Um, but the online feedback form also adopted a lot of that traffic too. Um,

And so that also greatly reduced the amount of email that I get on a weekly basis. And I can just go and, I mean, you know, just as you do, right? We log into the relay CMS, there's a feedback page. I can see all the feedback for all my shows. And that's been, that's been great. And then thirdly, I mentioned this earlier, but I send all my newsletters to feed bin. And so feed bin is the RSS service that I use and,

I love Feedbin to death. And what's great about it is that you get a special email address. And so you plug that into whatever newsletter you're signing up for. And then it just shows up like an RSS article. I like this for a couple of reasons. One, most of the newsletters I subscribe to are long form. And so reading them sort of in my RSS workflow just makes sense. But also it keeps them out of my inbox.

And so they're there in my RSS client when I'm ready for them. They're not getting lost in the jumble of my email. And so those three things for me have greatly decreased the amount of email I'm getting and has helped with the signal to noise in my inbox quite a bit over the years.

Yeah, I mean, the ultimate AI in automation is another human if you've got somebody else doing it for you, right? Yeah, Kathy Campbell's a real person, though. She's not artificial, real intelligence. But yeah, I mean, and I'm extremely fortunate to have people helping me do things now. And the ability to build something like our feedback form. Like, hey, we need this tool. Let me build it. And really, from the beginning...

you know, relay will be 11 years old very soon. Uh, from the beginning we've used Slack internally. It was like Mike and I, and like our other email hosts, like we rarely email each other. Occasionally we'll forward something to each other or like, you'll send me an email that you got from a listener. You wanted me to see, but like, we don't do our business over email. And so that's in Slack or in messages or someplace else. And that also has helped, um,

keep the email down. Like my relay email in particular is basically like external. It's not really an internal tool for us. And that also helps. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we were joking at the beginning, but you have replaced email in a lot of ways, at least the internal stuff with, with Slack. Yeah. Yeah.

Stephen, I take my hat off to you. I appreciate that. It's been a journey in the sense of decreasing my dependence on email, but I feel very stable in the tools that I'm using and I'm happy with the trade-offs that I've made with them. This episode of Mac Power Users is brought to you by 1Password. Go to 1Password.com slash MPU and you'll get 20% off and you can check out a free 30-day trial.

I use 1Password both at home and at work. With 1Password for families, my wife and I can share login information, things like our bank account and utility company, but we also have our own private vaults within the family account. So I can have login to all my weird personal nerdy stuff and she just doesn't have to see it.

And with one password for teams, I'm using it at work so I can share passwords with my teammates at relay. And again, multiple vaults give us a lot of control over who has access to what and really get fine grained control with that. I got one password across all of my browsers on all of my devices. I can use the simple command backslash to open it in the browser or on my phone.

I can use Face ID. You can use Touch ID on the Mac because 1Password is always on top of the newest features across the Apple ecosystem. And of course, they've got great support for things like autofill passwords so you can log in with the iOS keyboard and growing support for pass keys, which is really cool. But it's more than just passwords. You can also save information like bank accounts or passports with secure notes,

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A chaos. You've been on a journey. You've been wandering in the email desert again. Well, what's going on, buddy? Email's harder for me right now than it's ever been in some ways. I made a big change in my life a few years ago, got out of the legal racket, and in a lot of ways, my software stack got easier because of that. In fact, right now, I'm going through kind of an overall audit of my tools and just looking at everything anew.

But I think probably the biggest exception in terms of more complexity is email. And I started working on the outline. It's like, well, what kind of email do I get? Because I get a lot of it. And email is a weird term.

technology in that it's self-replicative, I guess you'd say. You send an email to someone and then they write you back. So the more email you do, the more email you get. It's so true. It's so true. The better you get at it, the worse it gets. Yeah.

so that's a thing but the um like i remember like some days i'll like boy i'm behind an email and i'll just stay up for two or three hours and send 100 emails and guess what i've got in my inbox the next morning like 100 emails you know so but but just in terms of email load um the first is just uh interactions with what i'll call consumers of mac sparky content you know podcast listeners blog readers newsletter readers

But also, you know, I sell field guides and I have labs members and people in those buckets often have something to share with me, something they saw that's cool, a question, you know, whatever it is. An email is the primary means of communication to me for that kind of information.

And those types of emails are not off. You know, they're not often quick emails. Like it's somebody that's got some good idea for a future show or something. I need to act on them, read them, process them. And then I've got a different category of related email, which I I'll call customer support because I,

In addition to giving you, dear listener, this free podcast, I also sell things, you know, and so people subscribe to the labs, people buy field guides and, you know, it's commerce. There's sometimes problems. The account email didn't work or the, they can't log in or there's some like issue like that. And that happens, you know, often enough. Now I am a small business. I am not

by any stretch of the imagination, a big business. And it's not like I'm getting hundreds of those customer support emails a day, but I get some every day. And, you know, if somebody's giving you money and they can't access the thing they bought, that's a pretty important email. You need to answer it and get it sorted out pretty quick, you know? And then I have another bucket of email I get, which is I'll just call planning and admin. You know, I've got

various things to keep all the wheels turning on the various systems I have. Everything from just paying for the host to just all sorts of things. And then you mentioned earlier cold pitches. This is like the bane of anybody who has any degree of success in this stuff. It's just

everybody writes you, they've got the product that they made. They've got the, you know, they represent somebody who's just going to be the best guest ever on your show. And, and,

It really is tough because you can't – I don't even find same black holes enough because they're very tricky. They are very tricky. They use different emails and they write subject lines that sound like it's something that you may actually have to read and you open it and like, oh, you got me, you got me. And so you've got a constant stream of that coming in.

And, and then I also have email that I think of as like new idea sources. Like I subscribe to interesting people that write long form newsletters that I like to read. And often that will lead me to ask them to be a guest on a show or, you know, something. So I've got a lot of email coming in and by its nature, you know, the more I respond to it, the more it comes back. Now,

I don't hate getting emails from listeners. I feel like we are a bit of a family here on the Mac Power Users. And the people that are listening to this show often are smarter than me and have great ideas. So the message I'm saying here is I don't want people to stop writing me. But it's hard to keep up with it all. And the thing you realize is

If I became a great email correspondent, we would never publish another episode. It would be a full-time job. I mean, very easily. Yeah. And that's a thing, right, that you have to be careful with. So I'm generally in a state of email overwhelm. I get too much of it, a lot of questions, a lot of support, a lot of admin support.

And, and I, you know, that can lead to problems like I want, especially the people who are a lab subscriber or buying a field guide, I want to make sure they get what they need as soon as possible, you know, but there's also a lot of good ideas in my inbox. And I want to engage with those because that helps me make better stuff for people that are listening to the show.

And all that being said, I'm constantly falling behind. And because I've given up the law practice and I've gone even harder at Max Barkey, I mean...

I'm putting out 100 videos a year in the labs. I mean, that's just tutorials, not including the meetups and stuff. I'm putting out field guides. I'm putting out more stuff, which leads to more emails. And so this has been a bigger problem for me since giving up law than I expected.

So how am I dealing with it? You know, the first episode was on email. I talked about ways of coping with too much email. I know all the tricks. I've read all the books, you know. No notifications. I time box email responses. You know, I've done a bunch of stuff, you know. Automation, I've got automation coming out the gills. My current email system is...

My personal email is on iCloud. You know, I've been, it's a .Mac account. It goes back forever, you know. It's been that way forever. And generally, it's fine. Like, the amount of personal email I get, I manage it in Apple Mail with a .Mac account. It's not overwhelming, you know. Yesterday, I got the bill for the garbage man, you know. That's...

That's a normal person email load on my personal account. Yeah. Not a problem. I can use pretty much any tool for that. And I have never really thought about changing it because it's not a problem. And I think that's the whole thing with email. If you use the default setup and you're not feeling overwhelmed or pushed by it,

then you don't need to change anything. I have SaneBox attached to it because I bought the bigger SaneBox account and I have it.

I don't really need it because I'm unlike my wife. I am stingy about my email address and I don't give it out to every person I buy something from and everything. So it's just, it's a very moderate load. And even in Apple mail, they've got the unsubscribe button there. Now I hit that thing. If it shows up, the question in my mind is not, should I press it is why should I not press it? So I, I unsubscribe aggressively and, and,

And my personal mail is just really not a problem.

But the Mac Sparky stuff is a problem. And so I do not run that through iCloud. My server is FastMail. I had used a couple different ones over the years, but I've been extremely happy with FastMail. It is fast. Their server-side rules are Google caliber. Their spam filtering is Google calendar. And they're way more privacy-focused than Google. I mean, you pay them money.

They keep your data secret. They're just a mail hosting service. They don't have an advertising arm. And their mobile app is excellent. Same thing, like Mindstream, you can create and enforce rules right on your iPhone using their mobile app. So in general, the process of getting email delivered to me and having cloud rules is absolutely satisfied with my current system. The problem is...

Even with the cool filtering and automations, I've said I'm still getting too much email and it's hard for me to keep up with it, you know.

So what have I done about it? I've gone all in with automation, as you would expect from someone like me, although I'm limited on that. Because when I look at services, like some of these online web automation services like make.com, Gmail is better because Gmail exposes more information to the online service, which allows me to create more complex and

and powerful rules. Right. You're kind of held back by what FastMail even makes available to automation.

Yes, exactly. And, and I can also make, you know, we, we poo pooed Apple's mail rules because you've got to have a running Mac, but I have a Mac studio that's running 24 seven. So I've got the full power of the built-in native Apple Mac rules available to me. And I guess I should say, you know, my current system is I use Apple mail as a client and

with the FastMail and there is zero problem. It works great. With FastMail, you can run it as a folder-based system or a tag-based system.

In fact, can I just rewind for a minute? Of course. I didn't get from you. Do you use the Google tags much, if any? A little bit. So I have, in my personal one, I basically just have a tag for each kid and then like church stuff. Yeah. My work ones are a little more complex. You know, I've kind of got one for each podcast. I will say...

or even like folders. It's kind of interchangeable, but not completely because an email can be in more than one tag in Gmail, which is weird until you get your head around it. I also use them sort of temporarily, right? So if I am working on a project that is not open-ended, right, or I'm planning a trip or something, I will make a tag to collect those emails. And then when that time has passed, I'll,

archive those and remove the tags. So some of them are transient. I don't have a ton. None of them are nested, but you know, maybe, maybe five or six in each of my work, work accounts. Yeah. So yeah, that makes sense. And like, it's just same thing as like a temporary mailbox for a trip. You can do the same thing with folder based system. Of course, always the advantage of tags is you can apply multiple tags, whereas you can only put a mail in one box. Um,

But I use FastMail as a folder-based system because if I'm going to open up an Apple Mail, I think I should kind of work with their paradigm. All right. So that is kind of how I've been managing email. But it's just too much. It's not so much that I'm a fancy boy and I need a bunch of a team, right? But it's enough that it's taking...

a lot of hours a week to keep up with it all. And so, you know, I, I thought like you, I need someone like Kathy in my life, someone to kind of help me manage this stuff. And for a while I had JF do it. JF is my editor and he, he stepped up and said, Hey, I'm willing to do it. And, and he did a great job of it. But the problem with that is,

He's a world-class editor and I'm pumping out a lot of videos a week. And I, what I really need from him is editing, not email answering, you know, and he has limited time. So it's like, yeah, I had to pick, what is he going to do for me? Well, he's going to do the thing that he's really good at and that he does better than I do. And so, so that didn't work. And so I, it kind of came back to where it's on my shoulder again, uh,

And like, as we record this, we're just finishing up the Alfred Field Guide launch. So I've had a lot of customer support email. And so this has been a thing for me. You know, I complain about it, but there's a lot of good with me processing email. I get a lot of good ideas. I get to get an idea of what people are thinking, who are listening to the show and buying my stuff because I want to obviously make things that they're interested in.

And me not reading the email would separate me from that. It also allows me to discover where the problems are. Like there were some issues with Teachable, my platform for releasing this, that I was able to, because I do the email, I was able to work with Teachable, get some things fixed,

Where the customer support email hasn't been as extensive with the Alfred release because things that were historically problems, I was able to fix on the back end or address directly. So there's a lot of good reasons for me to do it. It's not a complete waste of time for me to do it, I guess is what I'm saying. But I'm also feeling like it's taking too much of my time. So I went on a journey.

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You have this growing need of email. You've got a set amount of time. You're trying to box it into a set amount of time. So where has your journey taken you? I guess you're looking at different tools to help manage this? I cannot tell you where I am today because I got to get you there. You won't understand where I am today, Grasshopper, unless you come with me on the journey. Okay.

All right. The first thing I did was I doubled down on SaneBox. I increased my subscription to SaneBox to get like kind of the unlimited, I think they call it dinner or something and thought, well, I'm going to use SaneBox. I'm not going to change anything but that, you know? And so I, I've got a bunch of SaneBox filtering going on, like all of the bells and whistles going on with them. And it's nice to,

But I feel like SaneBox to me is best at the medium tier. Like when you start adding the extra stuff, I just didn't find that it was really solving a problem for me. It was just creating a lot of folders. And then I was getting to the point like, well, where is the thing that I need? And so it just, it didn't feel to me like,

I could solve the problem by upping the same box. The parts that I like about same box I'm getting at the medium tier. And I'm also aware that there is this kind of growing movement out there from people

who are making apps now that are trying to take a fresh approach at email. And I've been watching those from the periphery and I decided I want to go and explore those and see maybe there's a new way to look at email that I'm not using that could make this easier for me. And honestly, I think the word is more fun, right? If I dread it every time I go into it, that just makes it harder.

And all of the sandpaper friction stuff of Apple Mail does kind of cause me some grief. So I looked at several different platforms. The first one that I did, and this one was quite a lift, was I moved everything over to Hay. Okay. Go to Hay.com. Hay.com.

Yeah. Hey, these are the guys that make Basecamp. They, and they announced it with a much fanfare that they're taking a fresh approach to email. That was very attractive to me. The idea of getting something that, that can look at email in a different way. They have this ridiculous name, the inbox with an M not an N and because it's important, not just anything.

But the point they're making is a valuable one. I mean, as it is, anybody can put something in your inbox anywhere in the world. And that's what gets overwhelming. I was already getting around that to a certain degree with SaneBox, but SaneBox is not going to work with Hay. But I thought, look, I'm going to try their system. And I was in it for about three or four months. And there's a lot of stuff to like about it. Like they have a thing called the screener.

And what that means is if you get an email from someone you've never got an email before, you decide at that moment. They're like, hey, you got an email from Steven. You've never heard from this guy before. Is he important? Is he not important? Is he junk? And you get to say right at that moment, oh, this guy's important. Always put him in the inbox. Or

Or this is a cold pitch from somebody I've never heard of before. I don't ever want to see anything from this person again. And so you have like an intentionality at the beginning with new correspondence. And I think that was really great. They also kind of rethought like, what do you really need out of a, out of an email application?

So they have kind of built in filters or built in buckets. One is called the paper trail, which makes a lot of sense. Like you get a receipt or something and you want to hold onto it for a while. You put it in the paper trail. They have one called set aside where you can set it aside until you need it. Like, Oh, here's the thing for the new dentist. And I'm going to need that. When I go to the dentist, put it in this one place. I can find it easily. You can even select little portions of an email that way.

And the threading of the organization and threading is really good. If you've ever played with Basecamp, it is one of the most user accessible interfaces I've ever seen. Like you can stick anybody in front of a 37signals product. I think they, I don't think they call themselves that anymore. I'm sorry. They went back. I think they were 37signals and then Basecamp. And then they had a bunch of drama we're not going to talk about. And then to get away from that SEO, they changed the name back. Yeah.

Okay. Well, either way, I mean, yeah. And I don't want to get into the drama. I'm just talking about, is this thing useful to me? And absolutely. And they, they make really useful, easy to understand products. And like one of the things they, they built into this is a very easy way to collaborate. Like, so you could, uh,

get an account for yourself and get an account for your assistant. And you can trade emails between each other. When those customer support requests come in, you can hand it off to them. You can write a private note to the customer support person and they can read your notes and then they can go deal with the customer. Like they made that whole process really easy. And there's a whole suite of apps out there that are built for this type of thing. Ticketing systems are

But most of them are made for really big companies and don't really scale to a small guy like me. Whereas Basecamp made something that absolutely works, you know, and I liked it. But after three months, I still had that sandpaper feeling of this thing because they make it so user friendly. It's not fast.

You know, it's just not fast. You can't like fly through it. Like with Apple Mail and a series of Apple scripts I've cobbled together over the years, I fly through it, you know, or I move fast through it, let's just say. With Hey, I felt like I was constantly going to the mouse and just, you know, and it's just not quite robust enough for me. And I think the system they came up with would be great for me. Like if I put my personal email in there,

No problem. Like if I had maybe even just a little bit more traffic than my personal email, again, I think it'd be great for that, but it just ultimately didn't land for me. And I also didn't care for moving all my email onto their servers and stuff. I don't know. I just didn't want to do it. And, um,

And I really, you know, moved into it with the thought that, you know, I'm hoping this will be the solution and I'll never move. But it didn't work. So I, you know, then moved it back out. And I will say that the, hey, people make it really easy to move your email in.

And when I decided to move out, they were super helpful with me in getting it out. They were pros about it and great customer support. And I put the email back into the fast mail bucket and kind of had to lick my wounds and rethink. I think for a lot of people, Hay in particular is one of those solutions like you have to really work the way that it wants you to work.

Yeah. And if that clicks for you, that's awesome. Like I'm sure there's some people it scratches the itch perfectly when it comes to email, but I tried it when it was first announced. And for me, it did not work the way that I thought email should work. And so I bounced off of it pretty hard. And so I think like you're a, Hey person, or you're not a, Hey person. And I feel like with, Hey, that's a much, a much stronger element than a lot of other solutions. Yeah.

Yeah. And it is opinionated. And that's honestly exactly what I was looking for because I've been doing email the traditional way for a very long time and I'm not in a good relationship with email. So I need to find something else. Now, once I got everything kind of back and the dust settled, I still found myself facing the same problems. I was talking to Mike Hurley at the point because Mike was a big fan of this mail spark.

And, you know, I like the name, you know, it's a pretty good name. And the, but it was also had that ability to collaborate easily because I've always in the back of my head thought like at some point I'm going to get to a place and the right person is going to come into my life and, you

I'm going to have help on this. I feel like that is going to happen at some point, but it's just hasn't really happened yet. You know? So I, I like the idea that spark has that collaborative backend. And then I started playing with spark and,

And I realized that spark is very similar to, Hey, now I don't know which one came first, but there's a lot of similar paradigms in it, you know, and spark has a lot of the same ideas they have. Like, I forget what they call it, but they've got the thing where you sort when somebody comes in, you can like,

You can count them out or you can let them in. But it's using a native app and it works with FastMail so you don't have to move into their server. It's a more flexible way, frankly, to kind of play with that type of system. And I used it for a while and I don't really have much bad to say about it. I think it's good, except it still wasn't like...

the email problem for me. It just wasn't making things faster. It still left me kind of feeling a bit of email overwhelm. And at this point, I'm kind of thinking in the back of my head, Stephen, that I'm

I just have too much email. You know, you know, it's like, it's like the thing with tasks when people write me and say, I have 10,000 tasks and I'm in focus and I hate the app because it doesn't work. I'm like, no, you have, you hate the act because you put 10,000 tasks in it and that's, you know, you've got to be filtering. And maybe my problem is I've got to like,

Just take a new approach to email or just become a guy who doesn't answer email or, you know, I mean, I know people like that. Like I have friends that are in this racket who get big enough where they just don't answer email. But I just can't see myself doing that because I mean, I get so much good information from the email. I like our listeners. A lot of them over the years have become friends that started out with just a simple email. It's like, so yeah, I just don't, I'm in a weird spot.

Yeah, it's important to you even though there's a lot of it. Yeah. So I felt like Spark was fine, but it wasn't really scratching the itch for me.

And then when, and then for a little time, I had it solved by assigning it to JF, but you know, I need him to edit. I don't need him to answer email. And, and I felt bad and I took it back from him, you know, in the recent history. And then I'm, you know, I'm facing this problem again. And, you know, so I'm ready to like go nuclear. Yeah.

And I knew this show was on the outline list and it was coming up. So two weeks ago, I started a process of moving my email to Gmail and I signed up for Superhuman. This episode of Mac Power Users is brought to you by Terminal. If you've ever opened your phone to do something simple like check the weather and then find yourself doom scrolling for 10 minutes, there's a single purpose device that you want to check out.

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Wow. That's two huge things. Uh, where do you want to start Gmail or superhuman? Cause I have not tried superhuman it, it, I, the website's very pretty, but that's as far as I've gotten. So what's going on?

Well, so superhuman, I've heard from a lot of friends in our racket who are successfully using superhuman. And when I talk to them about it, they're like, Dave, you've got to just use superhuman. Multiple people have told me, just use superhuman. That's the one you want. But it has a huge lift involved because I've never been a Gmail guy.

And it only works with Gmail. Well, actually, it also works with Microsoft Exchange, but I'm not going to go there. Yeah, agreed. So am I going to do it? And I just decided, heck with it. What I'm currently doing is not working. There were so many friends that strongly endorsed it.

that I thought, okay, well, I'll take a risk. I moved email servers to Hey and back, and the world didn't end. I'm sure there were a couple emails I wrote during that Hey experimentation that I probably can't find now, but who cares? And so it's really not that big of a deal. I thought, I'll just set up a Google WorkSpaces account. They've got a migration tool. I'll pull my FastMail archive into Gmail,

Hook it up to superhuman. And then, you know, I'll, I'll know pretty quickly if it's for me or not. So that started like two weeks ago, a couple of things. First, first Google workspace does not make it particularly easy to get things set up. Yeah. I had done like an experiment years ago where I, I made a max Sparky domain in Google workspace for like a week.

And it didn't take for me and I canceled it. But for some reason that was in the system. So they wouldn't let me set it up again. And there's no human to talk to anywhere. And, you know, Google doesn't even really make it easy to get to a bot to get answers. And so I went through a process, but eventually I got a Mac Sparky Google workspace set up. And then I looked at the Gmail interface and,

And I almost bounced off. I'm like, this is so ugly. Do I really want to do this? You know? And, um, JF, my editor says, Dave, you're not going to use the Gmail. You're talking about something else. So just, you know, finish the experiment. So I did. And I loaded up the migration tool. They have a migration tool in Gmail that you point at your existing server and it magically pulls all your email in. But the problem is, um,

When I run it, it would make the connection, upload like 300 emails, and then say, job complete. I'm pretty sure I have more than 300 emails. Not true.

And, and I tried multiple times. And again, I tried to get assistance from Google with no avail. I asked chat GPT, I did Google searches. And I mean, this went on for like three days of me trying to get the migration tool to work. You have to create a CSV file for the transition. I kept rewriting the CSV file make thinking, well, maybe there's something about it. And

It's just very finicky. I'm obviously not a pro at Google workspaces. Maybe there's somebody I could have hired to do this for me that would have known exactly what the problem was, but I'd had enough. So I connected my Google workspace email to Apple mail. I went to archive on Apple mail on the Mac Sparky fast mail account, command a to select all. And I drug it into the Gmail account.

I did not move it. I copied it. I have moved email that way in the past, like helping people do things. Yeah. And you get rate limited sometimes on either end with the IMAP copy. You're also just at the whim of like Apple Mail to do it. And that can be a rough process. How did that go? Did your computer explode?

Uh, it did not explode, but the process was miserable. I figured I had about 150,000 emails or so, you know, been doing Mac Sparky since 2007. I mean, I have a lot of email, but I don't have tons, you know, I, I delete mail. I don't like keep everything. And when I first kicked it off, it said, Oh, great. You're moving message, you know, 500 of 50,000.

I'm like, well, that sounds about right. You know, maybe it's more, but you know, sometimes it takes a while to figure it out. Went to bed. I woke up the next day. It said, you have move message 20,000 of 140,000. That makes sense. You know, I figured it would kind of take a while to figure it out. But then from there it was all downhill every time I checked it. So I had it on a window just running separately on my Mac studio 24 seven and

And occasionally it would hit some sort of error and I'd click an okay box and it would just jump up and continue. But the numbers got so ridiculous. It's done now, but I'll tell you the last screenshot I got before it finished, I was sending them to you, but it was like, you have downloaded, you have uploaded a message 4,600,000 of 5 million.

There is no way I have 5 million emails. I, you know, it's just, I don't know what Apple mail was thinking, but something had gone horribly wrong with this process. And I just let it keep running. Now, if I go into Gmail and say how many emails of all mail, it says there's a hundred thousand. I'm like, that sounds about right.

But something went terrible in Apple Mail. And I did do it as a copy because I felt like if this experiment fails, I'll just kind of revert to whatever that database is then and just call it a day and lose anything I write during the interim.

But it got uploaded enough that I was able to set up a Superhuman account. You set it up. So the real short story on Superhuman, it's made by a guy who had written some really powerful plugins for Gmail that got sold and were doing really well. And same thing, an email zealot like me, he wants...

to make email better and he wants to like take a new approach to it so you know we've seen this before but superhuman is 30 a month and it's like that is crazy right yeah it's a lot of money like the license for mindstream is 50 a year superhuman is 30 a month

Like most people hear that and they're like, done. I don't want superhuman. I mean, why would you pay $30 a month for email? Well, if email is a constant strain for you, like it's been for me and I have paid humans to deal with it, $30 a month is a deal if it works. And I'm saying right up front, this is not for most people listening to this show, right? But if you've got an email overwhelm problem, it might work for you.

And so that's why I went into with an experimentation. I I'm going to pay for a couple months of it. The, the other thing was it was forever. It was really hard to get in. Like they have limited seats. And I thought that was still the case, but when I went to look at it now, you can just sign up for it. They've got their bandwidth enough now that you don't have to wait to know somebody to get in. Cause it's doing the thing spark is doing. Yeah.

Where it's like interacting with your email on the server side? Or do they have a server like in between you and Gmail? No, it's going to Gmail and it's pulling off Gmail. Like for instance, your email signature, they don't have an interface to make a new email signature. You just whatever email signature you set in Gmail gets applied. Okay. So this is a layer on top of Gmail. It's not replacing Gmail.

So it's using Gmail's underlying technology. In fact, I would say that might be a con. I think maybe it would be better if they had, if like, if it was like, Hey, where they took control of the whole widget, then you kind of get the privacy stuff out of there. And you just say, okay, I'm paying you 30 bucks a month. You host my email and you do all the cool stuff. But the, but it is on top of Gmail. So that's kind of weird. And, but that's why I had to go to Gmail was so I could run this superhuman experiment.

As we record, I am a week and a half in. Are you happy with the progress so far? I am interested. It's not, as you would say, an immediate bounce off. I have, to give kind of a big picture, it feels to me so ridiculous to pay $30 a month. And actually, if I sign up for it for a year, it's $33 a month because now they have like a second tier with some AI tools that I would want.

So I would be paying basically the value of an entry level iPad every year to have this email. So when I'm away from my computer, I'm like, this is stupid. Go back to fast mail. You like fast mail. It's safe and secure and just make it work. But every time I use this, I really like it. In comparison to Hay and Spark, this one resonates with me a lot better because

It just feels like the people behind it are like email nerds, and they're just trying to find as many ways to eliminate friction as possible. As an example, let me just go through. I've been keeping a running list of pros and cons, so I'm just going to go through the list now. And these really are in order of priority. They're in order of me observing them. When I first started using it, I got one of those cold pitch emails.

And I said, but it had an RSS subscription to it. I said, well, unsubscribe. I don't want this company to ever email me again. And it popped up a dialogue, said, okay, I see you want to unsubscribe. Would you like that? Or would you just prefer that I nuke the whole domain and you never get anything from that domain again? I'm like, oh, I like that. That's pretty sweet. Yeah.

And then it's on a little dialog box. And I'm like thinking, well, do I have to go over and touch the mouse and mouse down to that? And I just hit the arrow key and enter. And I never lift my hands off the keyboard. That domain is dead to me. Like, yes, I like that. And they have categorization similar to...

The way SaneBox does it, it's somewhere in between SaneBox and Hey. They have multiples, and there's ways to do it, and you can create custom ones. But the big one is important and other. That's the one that you get out of the box, and you can recategorize on the fly. And again, it's all keyboard-driven. This app is so fast because...

I think they must have somewhere written, we will never release a feature that requires you to touch a mouse. And so Command-K opens up like the universal controller. So if I'm in an email that's in my other box, but it's actually important, I hit Command-K and I type I-M.

And it says, oh, important. So you want me to move this important? Yes. Okay. Do you want just this one to be important or everything from this person to be important or everything from this domain to be important? Like it knows exactly the three levels of this, right?

And so you can recategorize at the domain level on the fly with a keyboard. Can you see what, why I'm liking this? You know? Yeah. I mean the, the, not only the speed just to like knock through things, because with a lot of email apps, there's a lot of like clicking and dragging and that slows you down. But those tools also make it easier to manage things kind of on a broader level. And superhuman, although it has a lot of AI built into it,

It is very much human. Like they have a helpline where a human writes you back immediately. So the next thing I did with it is I wanted to save an email for later. You know, like when you attach it to OmniFocus or reminders or whatever, right? I wanted a link to the email. I got far enough to realize if you command S, you can save a link or share it. Okay. But there was a box there. And then like, this is the first time I'm like, well, and I couldn't hit the box. There's no way to hit the box.

So I emailed them. I'm like, hey, I don't want to lift my hands off the keyboard. They're like, okay, so hit Command-S to get to the save slash share and then hit Command-S again and it saves it to your clipboard. So they thought that through. You just hit Command-S twice, you got it in your clipboard. Like, yes. So this is exactly the kind of nerd stuff that I love.

The another thing I love to do is I like to do inline replies. Like when I get an email from person, I'm going to reply to it. You know, if they say, you know, Hey, can I borrow a thousand dollars? And you know, are you free to go to the movies and you write back and you say, yes, what does that mean? Right. Yeah. Thanks for the money. Thanks. Yeah, exactly. So, so with this one and Apple mail is great at that. You highlight something and you hit command R and,

And then it just puts that piece up and you can reply to it. But that's it. Once you've done that, you're in the reply. And this one, you go to the message, you highlight the section you want to reply to. You say, can I borrow $1,000? So you highlight it and you just hit the R key. A lot of the key strokes here, it's like Gmail. Everything is just like one stroke. There's no modifier keys. So you hit R key. So then in your reply section, it indents that section you had highlighted and sets your cursor below it.

to reply so no you can't borrow a thousand dollars you want to go to the movies and you select that you want to go to the movies and i hit the rk again below that it drops that in and puts a cursor below that it allows you to inline replies to multiple questions it's just like this is little things that have bugged me forever and it's just there you know

The delayed send, that's a feature everybody has. But they have a smart delayed send. And this is the first thing I'm talking about where they're using AI. If I send an email to a guy in Germany, it's going to send it in the morning in Germany. And I don't have to figure out when that ends. Oh, that's super smart. I send it when it's at a good time for the recipient. And they say, okay, got it. Yeah.

Um, same thing with, uh, replies. Like if I send a message that I need a reply on, I send you a question and, and then, uh, I say, okay, so I write an email to you, Steven, you know, you need to get back to me on this thing, yada, yada, yada. And then I send the message to you and I hit the H key and it says, okay, when, when do you want to auto reply? And I'll say 2d and then I'll say, okay, two days. That's all, you know, so again, all in keyboard hit return. Um,

Now, and you have to turn this on, but in two days, it will say, here is a follow-up email to Stephen, approve and send. So it says, hey, Stephen, I sent you an email two days ago, haven't heard back. What's up? It writes it for you. Now, I'm not a fan of AI writing for me, but a follow-up email, fine. It's not content. It's not the core of your business. Yeah. Yeah.

And so like it writes it for you and you just hit one button and off it goes. And another thing is like, we've got a guest coming on the show named Simon in a couple of months. And I was doing some planning and I said, when is Simon coming on the show? I didn't write it down. And,

So, you know, the usual thing, right? I'm going to go and email. I'm going to look for emails from Simon. Well, they've got an AI button there, say AI query. So you AI query your email database. I just wrote, when is Simon coming on MPU? I didn't put his last name. That's all I wrote. And it said July 29th. And then here's the email if you want to go read about it. But it just answered the question.

That's, that's, that's really cool. Yeah. Right. I mean, you started to see it's like, it's like, this is pretty good. Like I've never been a fan of the whole read request stuff, but it shows me at a glance who's opened the emails I've sent in the last couple of days and

Like I don't really need that, but it does actually, I've found it kind of helpful on occasion. Like I sent something off to like a customer support thing. I say, Oh, he opened it yesterday. So it's probably working because I haven't heard back from him. You know, that kind of thing. It's collaboration ready. So if I bring on another person and I want to have them share email with them, I can share it from superhuman and they can see it.

without having a superhuman account. But if I pay the 30 bucks for them too, then it's really collaboration ready where we can have conversations and like, you know, kind of the same thing I would get with spark and, and Hey, but it costs more.

But the thing that really stands out is it's just so damn fast. Like the whole interface is built around. How can you get through this email fast? Like they really rely on, on deferred email. Like we were talking about earlier and thing, but for them, it's not a fixed set. Like it's not one day, one week, one month. It's just like whenever you want. So it's again, the H key. So you see an email and you're like H and

And you say one WM and then it's one week from Monday. And that's when you get it. You know, it seems like all of those things are like, once those are like kind of baked into your fingers, I could see you just being absolutely being able to fly through an inbox. Yes. Well, like yesterday we had a, I was going to take my daughter to dinner and I had a half hour before we're going to leave and

And I hadn't gone through email in a day. And I thought, well, I don't have time to really deal with email, but I'm going to go through and triage my boxes before we go. I got a half hour. Maybe I can get it done. I was done in 10 minutes. It's like, boom. And it surfaced a couple that are important. And for those, because we were going to dinner,

I just hit H key and I wrote 8 PM. So we got home from dinner to customer support. Things took care of them before I went to bed, you know? Yeah. And everything else was empty.

This is just on the desktop, right? I mean, you don't do much email, if I remember correctly, on your iPhone or iPad. No, I don't. But the apps are good on the phone and the iPad, too. They're native apps. OK. Yeah, if you go in Activity Manager, it says it's Apple. It doesn't say Electron or anything. So I'm assuming it's a native app. Yeah.

But it's just super fast. So I talked earlier about how you have like important and other, but you can also split your inbox based on tags or other criteria. One of them is you can create an AI agent to sort the email on, you know, search criteria. So I made one called cold pitch and I wrote out a description. Actually, I had chat GPT help me write it of what an email that would look like. That's a cold pitch. Yeah.

And so I wrote that and I said, anything that comes in like that, label it cold pitch and send it to our, you know, and don't show it to me. And so it does that now. And I don't see cold pitches anymore. They're just, I just don't see them because it identifies them when it comes in, it labels it, but it does have a box. I can go check it and read through them on occasion to see if I missed something, you know?

And like, it's got kind of breaks in there. Like if it's someone you've ever corresponded with before, there's like certain things that it won't do this, but by and large, the cold pitch problem is solved now, you know, clean minimalist interface. The whole thing is about speed and efficiency, human support,

And like one of the things it does is got a separate filter. They call it split inbox, like for anything with a calendar request in it. So you just hit that tab. You go through all the meeting requests. You approve or disapprove of them, especially if you're using Google Calendar. You can do it all right in there and just keep going. Yeah, I am kind of impressed. I also built an AI robot that searches out customer support emails. Okay.

And it's not perfected yet, but it's getting pretty good to the point now I can just go to that split inbox and just see the customer support emails I need to make sure I take care of. Were those not coming to like a separate email address? There's kind of everything else or how is that on the back end? The problem is my Max Barkey account has been on the internet since 2007. And most people just write that one. You can find it easy enough, right?

So I do have like forms and support. And I, like, if you look at the official channels, it tells you to go to this email. A lot of people don't, you know, so, but this thing just searches across the board, finds them and, and collects them for me. And I thought about splitting it up between labs and field guides, but it seems because the volume is low enough that just having one, I'm trying to keep it simple, you know, but it's like a command line for email and it,

It really is quite powerful. It does offer to write email for you if you want. And Spark did this as well, where you can just write a couple sentences and it'll expand it into an email using AI. I don't do that. I just can't go that step. Also, the dictation tools are so good that I can just hit a button and talk and draft an email faster than probably AI can write it.

So it doesn't really make sense for me. But if that's a thing for you, that's available as well. Man, I did not expect my day to start today thinking over this episode that I would get pitched on superhuman in a way that I am extremely curious about it now. All right. Let me tell you the bad stuff. Okay. Yeah, please, please. Before I hit a button, I don't want to hit 30 bucks a month. That's for email, right? Yeah.

In isolation, it's like $30 a month. But do that times 12 and then think about it. It's a lot of money. So you're using the starter or business? Business. And if I subscribe, for me, it's $33 a month. If I go for a year. I haven't got to that point yet. Another con for me is Gmail under the hood, but that's not a con for you.

another con for me is they really love the term inbox zero i mean it's like poor merlin yes right i think about merlin because he came up with that and everybody uses it and um and like hey inbox zero here's a pretty picture you know and i kind of get where they're going and they like celebrate it they're like hey you've had you know two straight weeks of inbox zero and it's like

Yeah, that's not the thing that just kind of on a philosophical level. I don't like that, but you know, whatever. I think it really helps a lot of people, but boy, poor Merlin. The limited platform availability, like you've got to be using Gmail or exchange. The learning curve is kind of steep, right? You've got to figure out all the keyboard shortcuts. They send you an email every day and then they actually have a webinar series. It's a live webinar.

And I went to the first one. It was an hour long. They walked me through a bunch of the features. They have a second one I can go through if I want. I have figured it out enough. I probably don't need that. But like, you know, it's an email app. You kind of have to learn. And if you don't learn it, you're not going to get the benefit of it. Right. I have a little bit of a privacy concern about the email tracking where it tells me when they open it. I feel like that's a little skeevy. Yeah, I don't love it.

And it just does it. Maybe there's a way to turn it off. But at the same time, I found it handy. Like I said, I mean, I had a customer dealing with a thorny problem. I sent him a solution, and then he didn't write back. But I saw he opened the email like 10 minutes after I sent him the solution. I'm thinking, OK, he got it figured out. I don't need to worry about that guy. And I think the biggest con is this is massive overkill if you don't need it. Like for my personal account, I would

That would be crazy, you know? But if, if you're feeling overwhelmed by email, I think like people in sales, people who have to deal with the heavy load, this is a good solution. And the other thing, and I'm granted, I'm still in a honeymoon period. It's fun. It's kind of fun to go through it. They, they, they make a game out of it. It's like, how fast can I go through this and find the wheat from the shaft? How, you know,

you know, how good can I get at like sending stuff off? Like I was doing a thing where like Friday afternoon for me is kind of the, the planning kind of admin time of the week. And I started sending emails to, I type FRI 1600, you know, and I did that on a couple of emails. And now every time I go to, to forward an email or to defer it, that's like the first option.

And it shows up on the phone too. So it's talking across the board. It's like attached to the account. This is resonating with me when I'm using it. When I, when I'm away from it, I still feel like I'm being too fancy, but I think this is probably going to work. And that comes with a real expense because if I do get to a point where I bring somebody in, it's not going to cost me $30 a month, cost me $60 a month. Cause I'm going to have to get that person on it too. You know, it's a lot of money, but yeah,

This is the first time in a long time I felt like email is not, you know, a weight around my neck. And in a way, like I want to have something you said, like for personal use, probably doesn't make sense. At least at the level our personal emails are at. But this is how you interface with your customers. Right. And listeners and readers. And, and,

As a part of your business and as like a business expense on, you know, Aston Martin with new CarPlay aside, like it's not a crazy amount of money. Like I've been looking, I've been looking at help desk systems for underscore what we're using isn't really working for us and their prices are getting ready to go through the roof. And so I've been looking at like ticketing systems and,

And you know, you could set that up for your support, right? They're all more expensive than this and not as good. Yeah. I looked at one for my team and it was going to be like $600 a year for something that was, couldn't hold a candle to this, you know? And yeah, it's really good. And honestly, if you hire somebody, $30 is chicken scratch compared to what it costs to bring a person in. And so, um,

Yeah, I am really into it at this point. I'm only two weeks into it, so please put an asterisk next to that. I have a history of getting excited about a solution and then falling off the wagon. But I did not feel this way after two weeks about Hay and Spark and all the other things I've tried. Interesting. Yeah.

If you want to try it, I think I can get an affiliate link where you guys can give me some free months if you decide to do it. So let me see. I don't know. I mean, selfishly. But the...

I don't even know if I can, if there's a link in the notes, you please use that, you know, but the, uh, uh, I think this is, um, really gonna probably work for me. And as painful as it was moving over to Gmail, there's like, I do have a background process in my brain. That's like, uh, you put everything in Gmail, you know, but I don't see it because I'm just in here all the time. I'm in superhuman. So that's my journey.

I think I found my email solution. I can't wait to hear more about it as you get settled in. It's already on my mental list for the feedback episode in June. I was like, how's it going? Yeah. Yeah. But no, it's great. I'm excited for you. The way it nuked my pitch emails and found customer support just with an AI prompt. You know, the other thing I really like about this is like,

I've been kind of following the company now and paying attention to their public statements and things. And it feels to me like they really get it. Like they're like, Hey, we're charging people a lot of money. We want to make the best email thing ever, you know? And we want to like, like they, there's a whole, that feature I said where it auto writes the reply. That's a new feature. They just added that before I came on board. But let me just show you and not show you, let me just tell you,

the list of features that they've added recently auto archive. So that's the thing where it determines it's a pitch email and archives it without me seeing it automatically create a draft with AI auto label email. That's where I wrote a, I wrote prompts and it creates labels to identify it as customer support. The reminder auto writing, the reminder and splitting the inboxes are all new features recently. And I feel like,

that their whiteboard is not blank at this point, that they're just going to keep pushing down on that stuff. I do kind of wish that they, they owned the whole widget though, that I didn't have to go through Gmail. Yeah. I also wonder too, like, I know they're charging a lot. They've also raised a lot of money. There's always that sort of business model question. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, please keep us posted. I mean, I know, especially like business owners who listen, you know, this is an issue for a lot of people. Right. And yeah,

Maybe this could help somebody out. I'm definitely glad that it seems to be easing your burden with email and that you continue to have email be your primary mode of communication in these areas and you're not just stopped answering emails. It sounds like it's allowing you to do what you want to do without the stress, and that's really good. That's what technology should do for us.

Yeah. And I've gone from on this journey from saying, well, I'll just try them out, you know, to in the back of my head thinking, yeah, I'm going to end up hiring somebody at some point and I'm going to get them on this as well. I'm just going to, you know, I'm just going to make this the system. Yeah. Yeah. And I've got a couple of friends in, in this space doing that. And they are, they're the ones that told me that, you know, stop fretting, just get it, just do it. And, and,

And they were right. And so, so I, I think this will probably be where I'm at. But again, I say it, you know, I'm not telling everybody listening to this. Just sometimes people listen to stuff I recommend. They're like, Oh, I got to do that now. Don't this. This is like, if email is a problem for you, you should look at this. But if you're fine with email, you know, you don't need to spend 30 bucks a month. Yeah. Yeah, man. What a world. Yeah.

I'm like looking at it right now. I just opened it up. I was like, this is great. Like there's four customer support items identified and I look at them and each one of them is something I need to deal with and that's it. And then everything else can wait. Yeah. That's cool, man. That's really cool. I have not talked to anybody who's actually using it. Like I've seen people talk about it. I think the Mac stories boys have experimented with it, but yeah,

it's good to hear what it can do. And cool that it's getting improvements all the time. That's important when software is new. Well, my dig against it when I'd heard about it and researched it thinking is like, look, I'm a nerd. I don't need them to write an app to make it easy to defer email. I can use SaneBox. Everything they said

you know, that they can do. I felt like, yeah, I could do that. Right. I could, I could write an AI prompt and connect it with a script to Apple mail. I could cobble something together a lot like this, but my experience for superhuman, the sum is greater than the parts. It really just, when you put it all together, it's if you just want to deal with email fast, like yesterday, that 10 minute, when I did that 10 minute thing, and it was like, I went through a lot of email in 10 minutes and,

That's when I finished that and said, oh, you know what? I'm going to tell everybody tomorrow on the show this is the thing now. Because this is it. I'm not going to be unwinding this. It's too good. Yeah. Anyway, so that's me and email and my journey. Cool. Had a happy ending. It does, yeah. And I hope it brings you the stability that you need. Yeah. I mean, look.

Poor me, right? I used to have to deal with lawyers, judges, lawsuits, liabilities, and now poor me. I have email from people that are nice. You know what the emails I used to get as a lawyer, they weren't all that nice. Oh, I'm sure. It's like, I'm overwhelmed with nice email. Boo hoo. Right. But I just, I just don't want email to be my job, but I do want it to be a part of my job. And this is, this is what I needed to make it work. Awesome.

Okay, so we're the Mac power users. You can find us at relay.fm slash MPU. Go there for feedback and membership. Membership? What's he talking about? Well, if you sign up for more power users, you get the ad-free extended version of the show. Today, Steve and I are going to be talking about CarPlay. It's just a lot of fun. We love having you there. You also get a bunch of other content from Relay. Check it out.

Meanwhile, thank you to our sponsors, 1Password, Ecamm, and Terminal. We were not sponsored by Superhuman, even though I sounded like it. And have a great week.