Overthinking Email
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. My wife still uses a Comcast address, can you imagine? I get hives just thinking about it. She gets a lot more email than I do, and never gives any of this a second thought. ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
I’ve been using Fastmail for my personal email for years. I have no complaints or issues with the service. I pay $50/year and it comes with 30GB of storage. It’s fine. I don’t love Fastmail’s web UI, but I nearly always use either Apple Mail or Mu4e (Emacs) for reading mail, so no biggie.
Except along came Mimestream, which for some reason I’m completely enamored with. Mimestream only works with Gmail, so I’ve unadvisedly configured Fastmail to forward to my Gmail address and my Gmail messages to send via Fastmail’s SMTP service so they’re From: jack@baty.net.
I can’t figure out what it is about Mimestream that I like so much. There’s no filter for “Unread”. There are no smart mailboxes at all. I can’t drag and drop messages into other apps or my Desktop. When copying links to emails, it uses the URL for the web version of Gmail instead of a link to the message in Mimestream. Oh, and it will (eventually) cost $50/year so I can use a mail app with a free service. WTF, dude!?
I’m never going to use only my Gmail address (remember the first requirement), but I may convert my Fastmail account to a forward-only account from the (Fastmail owned) PoBox service. That’ll save me like $30 a year, but I’m not convinced it’s a good idea. Point being that I’m considering all of this. This is what I mean by overthinking my email.
And so here I am, contemplating a transition from Fastmail to Gmail. It’s as if I’ve forgotten that this whole thing started because I wanted to play with a new Email app. I was hoping that writing this down would trigger my “Use What You Have” mechanism but instead I’ve started pulling apart my mbsync/Mu4e config to work with Gmail, because I’m a masochist with too much time on my hands.