I just got an invite/reminder email about a service called OnMail. I must have signed up to be notified when it became available. Could have been months ago: they apologise for it taking so long.

They should apologise for being bad for the email infrastructure that binds the world together.

I’m exaggerating, but only a bit. Email remains the most important thing on the internet aside from the web. Whenever you sign up for a service, or order something online, you expect to get an email confirmation.1

Without reliable email, a lot of things would fall apart.

A while back I wrote about Hey, the new email service from Basecamp. There, I was bothered by it not being based on the standard, open protocols that underlie email, at least to the extent that you can’t get your Hey email using a third-party, standard client.

OnMail seems both visually and functionally similar to Hey, and it’s got exactly the same problem.

This trend is bad for email, bad for people who use email. It should be possible to give us the kind of powerful, automated controls over our inboxes that these services offer, without stopping us from using the apps we prefer. It is possible to do that, as companies like SaneBox show.

I do not like this trend.

  1. Oddly, I had this expectation confounded just today, when Birkbeck’s submissions system didn’t send me any confirmations about the pieces that I submitted for assessment. ↩︎