What’s Wrong With Modern Email?

Email stopped being a simple (and maybe even convenient) tool a long time ago. After countless UI changes in Gmail, after hopping from one provider to another, I realized I don’t really trust email services anymore.

Even if a service lets you use your own domain, that’s just not enough today.

I quit Gmail about four years ago. Moved to Proton, hoping the service would grow in depth. But after two years I had to admit Proton was still inconvenient to use. So I migrated to FastMail. The result? Instead of one Gmail account, I now have three inboxes — and I still have to check them from time to time. Migration from one mailbox to another isn’t just about dragging your mailing lists somewhere else.

A huge number of services are tied to your inbox. Even if you simply change your domain name, your old account might keep important data. Or it might not. For example, Proton only gives you 1 GB of storage for free. So when I moved away from it, I had to delete 5 GB of data. No matter how hard I tried to preserve everything, I’m already facing gaps in my email history.

Honestly, choosing Proton in the first place was a big mistake, and now I genuinely regret the data that disappeared.

Email today is like an ID card or a phone number. It’s so important that you often don’t even want to touch it, because switching comes with a high risk of losing data — be it a contact, a saved letter, or even an email that hasn’t arrived yet.

And I truly believe we don’t need just another email service anymore. What we need is a comfortable tool that includes many related features. One of the most essential ones is the calendar. Planning is a part of daily life, which is exactly why email and calendar should go hand in hand. Most services support syncing with Google Calendar, but if you’re using anything else, events start getting lost. Sometimes, creating an event six months in advance, I catch myself wondering where I should put it so that I definitely won’t miss it — Google Calendar, macOS, FastMail, or Singularity? And yes, for really important events, I make duplicates. It’s terrible, but that’s the reality.

Now about email itself. Long ago, Google experimented with Inbox. I think it was one of their most successful projects — people just weren’t ready for that approach at the time. But I still believe emails should be treated as a kind of task. You can send them to yourself, build small projects around them. And if we’re talking about work emails, in most cases they are simply entities belonging to different projects.

Add reminders and notes on top of that. And suddenly email becomes not just a messaging service, but a powerful, flexible tool that helps manage and organize your entire life.

Note: This thought isn’t fully formed, but I decided to publish it as is.