Thinking out of the inbox
How email might need to start living outside of the box
It really feels like a renaissance in subscribed email content is happening at the moment.
I’m subscribed to a handful of emails which I look forward to receiving, and actively look out for in my inbox, including Matt Locke’s Storythings, the Quartz daily briefing and Obsession mailers, Delayed Gratification’s Slow Post, to name just a few.
My inbox is feeling a little like how RSS and Google Reader used to be — a single place to go for a variety of content, rather than going to a handful of specific websites one by one.
It’s like my stack of magazines at home — I can grab whatever I haven’t read yet, and I know I’ll find something enjoyable and surprising, in a ‘open to discover’ mode, rather than a ‘actively seeking’ behaviour.
The challenge is that they sort of get lost in the clutter of my email — work stuff, personal stuff, updates, order notifications, spammy marketing and then the wonderful desired content.
It feels like there’s almost need for a separate newsletter reader app — not dissimilar to what the Podcasts app is to podcasts, a single interface where I can see my subscriptions, browse the most recent content, store stuff i’d like to keep, search back issues, and so on.
For now, I might just move my subscriptions to a different and dedicated email address so the inbox is nothing but solid content, but I’m interested if anyone else has started exploring that concept, or seen anything which does this job?
