Migration to Fastmail Going FAST

Spent a few hours in Fastmail to get it ready to fully replace my HEY Mail subscription. Got my new email domain name set up in Cloudflare. The Screener functionality that I liked in HEY is now fully operational and is based on a Contacts Group. The Paper Trail is also set up and based on another Contacts group. Basically, if an email uses a contact not in the Screener, it will be moved in The Screener label. The same happens for the Paper trail. If I want a specific email to go to the Paper Trail, the contact is created and added to the right contacts group. One email account (Gmail) has been configured for Fastmail to pull content from it (no need to use email forwarding, so everything is configured from Fastmail. My Gmail account is a low-volume account so that I can tweak things before connecting my primary email accounts (both are Apple-provided).

I’m not sure if I’ll actually need to set up a paid subscription to Fastmail, maybe paying for one month will be needed to fully evaluate the capabilities, though, but from my current experiment with this service so far, I must say that I really like what I’m seeing. It’s certainly fast.

While browsing Substack yesterday and this morning, I stumbled upon a writer from Ukraine that I’m eager to follow. Isn’t it surprising that I can’t subscribe to his content via an RSS feed? I’m quite impressed by how this platform is so tightly controlled. It’s too bad.

Emails Shuffle

I’m making progress in cleaning up my email mess. I closed my Yahoo Mail account, which I only used for Flickr when the authentication backend moved from Flickr to Yahoo1. I closed two Gmail accounts: one of the two was used when I was developing iPhone apps between 2009 and 2013. This means I have three fewer email redirections for HEY Mail. Most of my newsletter subscriptions are now redirected to Inoreader, which is another dependency removed from HEY Mail.

So, what’s left in HEY Mail? Two email redirections: one .me email account1 and my primary iCloud mail account. These are my biggest email accounts. Of course, I also have my HEY Mail account that I use in a few dozen places. That’s the last part to move out. The question is: which email account should I use instead of my HEY Mail? Is this where Fastmail comes into play? Or should I merge them into one of my Apple-hosted mail accounts? If I choose the latter, I don’t see the point of using Fastmail unless I want to replicate the Paper Trail functionality of HEY Mail. Even then, Apple’s latest updates to Mail offer something similar. I should probably try the latest betas on my Mac and see how well it performs. Stay tuned for the next update on my emails shuffle.

  1. I also officially closed my Flickr account. ↩︎ ↩︎

There is something so satisfying in closing online accounts and deleting data. It’s really hard to explain. This process only happens when moving things around (like moving from one email provider to another).

I think I found a viable way to replace Readwise with Craft1. The fun thing is that I found this while recording my next video. It’s possible because of a recently launched browser extension that saves an article into Craft. More details in my upcoming video. Here’s a sneak peek.

  1. I cancelled my Readwise subscription today. ↩︎

I logged into my Substack account today because I’m working on something and I couldn’t believe how different it is from a few years ago. I don’t even recognize it anymore. Are they trying to become another LinkedIn or Facebook? Or maybe they’re chasing TikTok or YouTube? What is going on?

If Only I Had Gen AI Back in the Day

I acquired the skill of programming in Objective-C and developed iPhone applications between 2009 and 2013. Since I had learned programming concepts during my Computer Science degree, I didn’t have to begin from scratch. However, with the advent of generative AI, I can’t help but wonder how my learning experience would have unfolded differently. I think that it would have been significantly expedited while exploring creating different apps beyond the one I was developing.

Another pricey subscription cancelled: Timing.app. After the initial excitement to learn about how I spend my time on my computer, I think it’s time to conclude: I spend a lot of time on a computer for doing a lot of different things. There is a cheaper alternative called Currentkey, that I plan to test in the near future, though.

Bye Bye Readwise?

Just got a reminder to close my Readwise account, probably because the subscription renewal is coming soon. That’s not a cheap one. Beyond serving as a repo for text highlights from Micro.blog and Inoreader, I don’t really have a meaningful use for it. I don’t use the Readwise Reader either. I export highlights into Bear from time to time as markdown files. I almost never search them. Sometimes I’ll read a few highlights with amusement or nostalgia, but nothing more. Why am I doing all this, then? 🧐🤷🏻‍♂️