Personal email in the age of capitalism

Photo by Maxim Ilyahov on Unsplash

I have a problem. Or, rather, I have an annoyance: Email is still the default method of communication in the age of the internet, but finding a solid, unified email solution is difficult, if not impossible.

I currently have a record low of two main email addresses. The first is my personal email, a Google account I’ve had for a very long time. The second is my university email, an Outlook account I’ve had for a few years, but which I’m required to use by the university for all university-related business. As I wrote, though, this is a record low — as an adjunct, I frequently had to regularly check 4–5 email accounts depending on how many universities I taught for at a given moment.

At one point, it was relatively easy to just toss all of those onto my Google account so I didn’t have to check multiple inboxes every day — I could just open up Gmail and see all of my email, as well as respond to all of that email from the appropriate email address. In other words, I’d get, e.g., my Rutgers email and my personal email in one account, and if I was responding to a Rutgers email, the response would come from my RU email address.

The problem is that this has slowly been changing. I use Rutgers because that was the first address to change — shortly before I left for my doctoral program, RU moved from Gsuite to Outlook, and along with that, blocked our ability to get our email in Google. In fact, we couldn’t even set up our accounts to forward email from our RU accounts to our personal accounts — the only way to access RU email was to log into the RU account.

Ditto at UAlbany now. When I first started at UAlbany, we were able to set up personal email accounts to get our uni email using POP. We are no longer allowed to do so; we can forward our email still, so that’s a plus, but if I want to respond from my albany.edu address, I have to log back into Outlook.

This is annoying. So the solution might be to use a third-party unified-inbox client, right? Well, no.

I regularly use four different operating systems: Windows, Linux Mint, Android, and iOS. Over the past week-ish, I’ve been playing with different email clients in an effort to find a solution that doesn’t require me to check two different accounts throughout the day. My basic requirements are as follows:

• Needs to work across the above OSs (in-browser access is fine).
• Needs to offer a unified inbox with access to both my personal email and my uni Outlook email.
• Needs to provide good organizational options.
• Needs to have functional keyboard shortcuts.
• Needs to be affordable, though not necessarily free.

This … has not actually been easy.

• While I can’t merge my Outlook and Google accounts in Google, I can do so in Outlook. The problem is that my university will then have access to my personal email. The alternative would be to use the app rather than the web app, but I can’t do that in Linux (and in fact it kind of sucks in Android, too).
• Thunderbird can’t access my uni email account since POP/IMAP is no longer supported through my uni account.
• eM Client isn’t available for Linux and doesn’t offer in-browser access.
• Mailbird isn’t available for Linux (etc).
• Spark isn’t available for Windows (etc).
• Blue Mail wasn’t able to access my Google account (which was pretty fascinating, TBH).
• Evolution is desktop-only, and it’s not clear if it’s actually available for Windows or if people have just created forks.
• TypeApp is pretty solid, except that its shortcuts are extremely limited. This may seem like a nitpicky thing, but it matters for organization — in order to organize emails, I can’t just hit a shortcut and type the name of the folder; I have to click on the folder icon, then scroll to it. Again, maybe a bit nitpicky, but this slows things down quite a lot.
• Spike was the best alternative that I tried — it was able to cleanly and easily unify both accounts; it works on all the above platforms; and I actually really like the conversation-style inbox. However, its approach to organization leaves a fuckton to be desired, both in its design and its execution — e.g., emails that I move have a tendency to pop back up in my inbox — which I suspect is because you’re not really supposed to delete or archive emails for the most part. But, especially for my work email, I need to be able to tag and organize emails effectively.

There might be a great alternative that’s out there that I just haven’t tried, and it’s also possible that there’s a way to make one of the above work well. But the point is that even if there is, it’s way harder than it should be. The current email climate is that most of us have multiple email addresses and frequently need multiple programs to access those accounts with no clean, easy way of simplifying the process.¹

I suspect that in large part this is because email has developed not as an equalizing communication tool but, in a capitalist world, as a tool for business. You can see this even in the way these various clients present themselves: they describe themselves as solutions for “teams” or companies, with personal email as an afterthought — companies like Inky even require you to contact their sales department for a quote instead of just making their pricing clear up-front (which is why they’re not included above).

This is massively frustrating and, I think, demonstrative of why “the free market” and capitalism more broadly often does not create a world that benefits people. Email has been an absolutely revolutionary communication tool, but at this point, it has developed in a way organized around businesses rather than people. It’s easy to understand why people, especially younger people, don’t like using email. However, nothing has managed to replace it on a personal level.

This is more of a rant than anything else. But, I do wonder what might have happened if these new technologies had been developed around people rather than businesses. At the very least, I might be able to access my accounts in one place without having to sacrifice usability or efficiency.

¹ I think there’s a similar problem with regular messaging, but I’m less concerned about that.