send more cute email <3

i created my first email account on my family’s home computer when i was a ennie weenie 5 year old. back then, one of the highlights of my day was coming home from school, checking my inbox, and seeing if any of my neighborhood friends had sent me an email.

nowadays, checking email does not feel as fun1. most of my inbox is flooded is with noise, mostly receipts, marketing, "You Left Something in Your Cart," OTP codes, etc. with little amounts of cute, personal email interspersed between.

recently i noticed some friends of mine have been creating personalized newsletters2 & whenever i see one of their emails in my inbox, i feel like an excited little kid again. i wish i could see more of these emails, and less of the aforementioned cluttery emails.

for those unaware of why i suddenly have been posting on substack, i am doing a one-blog-per-day challenge with neel for the month of january3. i think one of my favorite things about doing this so far is that i now get to wake up to cute messages from friends saying they enjoyed reading something i wrote. i have lived enough different lives in different places that it’s hard to meaningfully keep up with all the friends i’ve met along the way. i love that blogging is a great way to pretty easily increase shared context with those who i don’t live near anymore and give those friends an easy reason to reach out and say hi :D

also, email also seems to be one of the increasingly rare corners of the internet where you can with both keep up with friends + not get sucked into a blackhole that has been thoughtfully engineered to hijack your attention and serve you endless amounts of content.

i implore you to do your part. send me or someone else a cute email today!

1

spam seems somewhat of a inevitable consequence of the ethos behind SMTP, which was built in the 80s for a small, high trust academic network. back then, you could send emails claiming to be anyone, and there was no verification process or sender verification. since then, there have since been a series of auth mechanisms that have developed on to fix email spoofing, but not so much the volume of automated/transactional email from apps and websites that you interact with.

2

some just do a simple google group & bcc people, others have a more fancy customized CMS + newsletter system

3

i am severely in blog-debt but intend to pay it back in full