You Can Fix Email
You Can Fix Email
August 10, 2026
Lots of essential software is getting worse in ways that you can't do anything about.<br>You can't turn off the autoplaying videos on Instagram;<br>you can't control the software updates to your car;<br>you can't clean up the bloat that has metastasized across Windows 11.
But you can fix email, for two reasons:
It's an open standard - emails have to be able to talk to all the other emails, no matter what business provides them<br>You can own your identity - if you have a domain, you can switch email providers without changing your email address
Two years ago I took advantage of these properties to turn email from an overwhelming mess into the most organized part of my life.<br>It's very easy, and I'm going to show you how.
What we're going to do
The concept is simple: buying a domain lets you easily create multiple email addresses, but manage them in a single inbox.<br>By using different addresses in different places, incoming emails sort themselves, and you never miss the important ones.
Suppose you own the domain example.com.<br>You can set it up so that every email ending in @example.com goes to you.<br>This is a basic setup that's similar to my own:
me@example.com<br>contact@example.com<br>login@example.com<br>purchases@example.com
One email I give to friends and family, one is posted publicly online, one I use for logging into important websites, and one is for buying things.<br>Each of those addresses gets its own folder in my inbox and emails sent to each one go to the appropriate folder automatically.
This means that all the random newsletters and marketing and spam—what happens after buying anything that requires an email—gets sent to its own folder.<br>They don't compete for attention with emails I actually care about.
Folder<br>Unread emails
me@example.com
contact@example.com
login@example.com<br>40
purchases@example.com<br>450
What my inbox folders look like on any given day
For example, the purchases@ folder has hundreds of unread emails, but I never worry about that, because I don't give that address to anyone I need to hear from.<br>I can still check that folder if I need to find a receipt or a ticket or something, but a lot of it is Buck Mason telling me that I'd look handsome in a $250 chambray button-down (you're darn right I would).<br>I never bother to unsubscribe from emails that are sent to this inbox—the whole point is that I don't have to curate it.
Meanwhile, the me@ folder has no unread emails, because that address is the one I give to friends and family.<br>They send me 1/100th the email volume that marketers do, so that folder is very easy to keep up with.
I use login@ for online accounts I care about—banks, utilities, airlines, socials, that sort of thing.<br>Having a separate folder for just logins is a game-changer because I actually see email notifications from them, like bills due or flight cancellations.<br>I usually don't feel any need to mark these read, but I have confidence that I will at least glance at anything that gets sent here.
I do unsubscribe from all marketing emails that go to login@, like offers from my credit card company.<br>This is worth doing so that the folder only has useful notices.
There are ways to get more nuanced with it (I have another address for subscribing to newsletters), but in general it's good to start small.<br>Just having these four separate emails, managed like this, has been a major improvement to my life.
sometimes sign you up for marketing, but I actually take the time to click unsubscribe on those, and because they're real companies they tend to honor it. -->
A note about cost
You have to pay for the domain and the email service.<br>The setup I'm describing costs about $6/month, total.
You might balk at the idea of paying for a service you currently get for free, but I suggest you at least consider it!<br>Email is the universal online identity layer and the first way that many places will try to contact you.<br>Not missing important emails—and not worrying about missing important emails—is, at least to me, worth the price of one coffee a month.
Email is a service and running a service costs money.<br>If you're not paying for it directly, then the provider is extracting value from you somewhere else.<br>They certainly don't benefit from you filtering out marketing emails on your own—in many cases, they want you to rely on their algorithmic filters, so that they get to decide what emails you see.<br>The system I'm describing here is not supported by any free email service that I know of, nor would I trust one that did.
Fortunately, email is a cheap commodity with low switching costs—if you use your own domain.<br>I'll talk more about the importance of that at the end.
How to do it
First you have to buy a domain.<br>There are plenty of sites where you can do this.<br>I recommend Porkbun.<br>Cloudflare is also fine.<br>Never use GoDaddy.
Porkbun's branding is a little twee for my taste, but, in fairness, they are based in Oregon.<br>It could be a lot...