Really owning your email

In all of my talk over the years about owning your website with WordPress and owning your notes with Obsidian, I’m well-aware that I had a big hole in that philosophy when it came to my email. It was all in Gmail, where I have zero actual ownership of my account.

The problem is that taking ownership of your email can be really hard. Using WordPress and Obsidian can be tricky in some cases, but really owning your email can be much more difficult. However, a recent conversation with Sanjay Parekh showed me that I was looking at it all wrong.

The two parts of email

I always saw it as “my email”. One thing. One service. My email account.

That’s sort of true, but Sanjay explained that when it comes to ownership and control, there are really two pieces.

They certainly are related, but there is a big difference. While I save pretty much all of my old emails, it’s access to the address itself that is far more valuable, and I had never really considered those two separate pieces before.

As I first shared nearly 15 years ago, the goal of using email is to mine the content out of each message and move on.

Add the event to your calendar. Download the file. Do the task. Answer the question.