by godelski | 2025-11-19 19:18:19+00:00
I still use Thunderbird and I love it. Even though I absolutely hate email and it is a chaotic clusterfuck we act like is bulletproof.

I'm incredibly impressed at how feature deficit email is, but Thunderbird gives a lot of power back. It's just a lot of little things that add up. Like why is tagging and sorting so hard? But Thunderbird makes it easy, giving you as many as you want and let you label as you please. In Gmail, Outlook, or Apple Mail you can't implement filtering, but in Thunderbird you can. There's just so many junk emails being sent from accounts I can't outright block and my inbox is a nightmare of chaos without these. Sure, I wish I could do regex and it was more feature rich, but it is strong enough that I can already catch a lot of emails that Gmail's spam detection misses. Like what the fuck is with this spam detection, it is missing things where my email is not even in the To or {B,}CC fields![0]

> And you could use it on any machine.

The only thing I'm missing is on iOS. Email on my phone is a literal joke. Apple Mail[0.1] is the only one (compared to Gmail, Outlook, and Thunderbird) that previews a PDF. It seems like they're just helping scammers. I routinely get PayPal crypto scams and they look reasonably legitimate on Apple Mail but nowhere else. I could see how someone could be fooled, but I don't even have a PayPal account lol.

But on this note, we really do need to do something about email. We treat it so poorly. I use a lot of relay and proxy addresses now[1]. I'm also sending out a lot of resumes lately and it is surprising how we treat email. Like Microsoft only gives you SSO and then forces your email through that, not allowing you to add another email address. Not everything is "godelski@gmail.com", I use "linkedin@godelski.mozmail.com"[2] and "resume@godelski.com" (ditto [2]). In a world where we keep IDs for decades, where emails are constantly scraped and leaked, and where logins are tied to emails, these proxies are more important than ever. When I dump my gmail address I can also just redirect my two entry points (the mozmail and website domains) towards my new one. It is still not a great solution but at least it is easier to dump linkedin@godelski.com and move to new_linkedin@godelski.com than it is to go from godelski@gmail.com to godelski123@gmail.com.

If anyone has a better solution to this too, please let me know. I really fucking hate email and it seems like there's a ton of low hanging fruit

[0] The source of the email is a bit complicated and is clearly a LLM bypass by looking like generic emails like password resets or login alerts, but if my email was godelski@gmail.com it looks like it is sent to `godelski@gmail.com <bnchrch123@utahit.net>` CC `bnchrch1a2b@somehash.namprd04.prod.outlook.com`. It feels like we've gone backwards in spam detection. These are trivial to detect!

[0.1] And dear god, the least Apple Intelligence could do is run a god damn Naive Bayes filter on my text messages. You can surely do that on device! No Angela, I don't want to learn more about how I can make $500/wk and at no point in time have I ever wanted to accept a text message from a +63 country code... nor do I ever accept a call from my original area code as I haven't lived in the area for decades and it is a great filter to know who's spam.

[1] I use both Firefox relay and my personal website as Cloudflare gives you free email forwarding. Firefox relay integrates into Bitwarden (most of the time...) and it makes it really convenient for giving websites unique emails and unique passwords. Also helpful when you are given a piece of paper as you can create an email on the spot, block them as needed, and track how they're traded.

[2] I don't actually have the "godelski.mozmail.com" domain, so don't send me mail there. Though I wish relay would allow you to buy a second domain (and Signal would allow you at least 2 usernames!) At least give me one "clear" and one "handle".