Email is Good, Actually.

A very good friend of mind lives behind the Great Firewall. I love him dearly but the time difference and the constant blocking of chat services and calling services have made communication over the years difficult. Recently I asked if he'd be interested in emailing instead. We're two months into this experiment and I think it's going quite well!

Email got a bad reputation over a decade ago and now we all text each other, but I'd like to consider bringing it back, especially for my long-distance friendships. Here are some reasons why:

Thoughtfulness

I can go for weeks without emailing my friend. There is a lack of temporality in the way we write. That breeds a certain degree of intimacy to the emails we do receive. We give each other updates on our love lives. We write about our careers. We write about getting older. The longform nature of an email means we're not shooting thoughtless texts at one another.

Open Standards

Email is on every platform. It doesn't matter if I'm responding to my friend from a web client on my work email, or Mutt running on my Linux personal laptop running Fedora Silverblue or anything else, really.

Fastmail is very performant. Mutt is speedy. Every texting app I use feels utterly bloated in-comparison. All we're doing is sending text to each other. It shouldn't be this hard.

I own my data. I can download a copy of every email I've ever received since high school onto my laptop from an IMAP server. I can search through it in seconds. Messenger search has been broken for a decade and no PM at Meta feels it's worth the engineering effort to fix it. Signal doesn't support iOS backups yet. Matrix is just clunky. Our communications tools feel so broken. Email is fast. I've had email since I was in the second grade. The protocols that power email will outlast whatever silly new instantly vanishing texting app Sequoia Capital funds next.

Personal Email Correspondence Has No Expected Response Time

PMs and Growth Hackers have spent so many man-hours trying to hack engagement into texting apps. It's such a cliche to rail against the attention economy, but email platforms seem free of this. Plain emails are free of read-receipts, last seen messages, etc. When I email my friend, I'm not expecting a response in minutes or days. I fully expect that it could take days, weeks or even months for him to find time to find the time to reply. I do know that the reply will be intentional, though.

I'm guilty of being a bad texter. At the same time, I don't think we naturally evolved to be in a world where everyone we've ever met is instantly reachable at all times. I hate the expectation of permanent availability that platforms have locked us into. I've spent so long trying to figure out life hacks to stay on top of the mountains of texts I receive.

But perhaps we weren't meant to live this way! Email feels more human than iMessage or Messenger. Here is a little message in the bottle. Maybe send one back if you have time.

But Email is Full of Junk

This is an easily solvable problem! Through inbox rules, you can easily filter people who are not contacts to a separate folder. I follow Basecamp's Hey email service's philosophy on email organization and it's working quite well for me. Also, after I religiously unsubscribed from every irrelevant newsletter I received I've found my non-human inbox to be quite tolerable.

Email is Insecure

The biggest con for email is that it is an insecure medium. Your email service provider can easily read all of your email contents. This is bad! We should think about fixing this. However, the feeling of joy I get from maintaining a long-distance friendship over e-mail outweighs these privacy concerns for me right now.

Let's Email!

Are you a long-distance friend? Have we not chatted in a while? Let's email!