Choose craft software
2nd April 2025
In this post I am going to try to make you care about some things that you almost certainly don't care about. Let us start with custom email hosting.
Purelymail is a one-man-band company that, as the name promises, deals purely in mail. That is the sell: no BS, no tracking, just your email. The barebones nature of the service is part of the aesthetic:
To those unfamiliar with the world of software made by one or a handful of obsessive enthusiasts, they might see a website like the above and think it is at worst a scam, at best a low-effort GCSE Computer Science project. What I wish to convince you of is that services that look like this are so good that they don't have to care about looking pretty*. To be sure, there is beautiful craft software out there, like anything my friend Judah makes, but more often than not it looks like this. So why use it?
Although I have some morbid misgivings with having a single point of failure for critical email, they have been all but displaced by how nice it has been to use Purelymail. It's the only mail provider I've used that configures DMARC records by default – a necessity if you want people to actually see your mail. It has better passkey support than pretty much any big-name service I've used, not just for email, but generally. The servers are super fast and worked seamlessly with all of my mail clients. 10/10 mail deliverability straight after configuration. All this for £7.70 a year.
My previous mail provider, Zoho, has a yearly revenue of a billion dollars, yet has accomplished precisely zero of these things. I have no idea who owns or runs Zoho. Purelymail is run by a guy called Scott. When I had a question about whether the SMTP port had auto-configured correctly on my phone (it did, by the way), I sent him an email and he responded 40 minutes later. I'd be lucky to get an automated response that fast from BigCorp.
This is the 'craft software experience'. It shows us what the entirety of our digital lives could be like if we collectively chose to vote with our wallets for doing the basics really well. On the other hand, we can definitely live with and tolerate commercial slop software. Most of the time, and for enough people, it works OK. The harms of having our data harvested en masse and fed back to us through diabolical algorithms optimised for maximising user-minutes in unsavoury ways only feel scary when stated plainly in this fashion, but in practice feel quite abstract and difficult to care about. I'm not going to try and convince you otherwise. But I will tell you that to give into this entirely is to expect too little from the computer you own and the software you run on it. If you truly contended with the amount of time you spend on your devices, how much mental space they take up, I think you too would find ways to make that experience feel more intentional, personal, even beautiful.
We are entering into an age of faceless technology – I suspect that before long, the vast majority of the software we use will be orchestrated and maintained almost entirely by AI models. Yet, there is something so gratifying about doing something mundane like sending emails whilst feeling a sense of ownership and control over the technology I use to accomplish it; to feel acquainted on some level with the makers of the tools I use; and for there to be appreciable care and thought in these tools.
I do not expect you to care in this way about the software you use, but I hope to have imparted enough discernment for you to feel disgust the next time you see a 'Notion Mail' advert. 'Isn't this just a wrapper for Gmail that siphons my email contents for LLM training data?' you will ask quizzically. And a tear of pride will roll down my cheek.