Published 2025-07-11
tag(s): #email
A few days ago I wanted to setup a donation. Or tip. The language around these things is
weird. A subscription? Support?
And when I tried, it turns out it was a ko-fi page, and I recalled I had setup a profile a
long while ago.
The thing is, even though I had the password in Bitwarden, I couldn't login to ko-fi, because
it was set to an old account and I wasn't getting the one time code to log in forwarded.
I panicked a bit, then eventually contacted ko-fi support and they changed the login email as
I had requested.[1]
I think this was setup around the time of GitHub Sponsors launching. A few of my Emacs
packages started picking up users, and GitHub launched the sponsors program, and I figured I
could setup a donation page. I was disappointed that initially[2], GitHub
Sponsors seemed more oriented to recurring subscriptions, than "one time thank you"
donations.
I will be honest, I never expected to earn money to like, sustain myself. My expectation was
more of a "someone liked this enough to drop a dollar as a sign of appreciation" kind of
thing.
I had an seb.hoagie@ account for most things, and an smonia@ one
that I listed in my CV and used for "serious" stuff. This system was OK, by the time I moved
away from Outlook.com(last one before paying for my email)[3] I was savvy
enough to make "smonia" an alias and centralize my inbox.
Ko-fi was setup to one of the smonia@ accounts, which at first I thought had been
closed from lack of use. I finally was able to reset it today, and what happened was that the
one time code email was classified as Spam, so it skipped the forwarding rule.
When I started using Fastmail, first I made an effort to clean up any subscriptions to newsletters and promotions, to make sure my inbox only had useful things.
But then I overdid it with the aliases, thinking it would help me manage my email better by
hyper categorizing it: capsule for my Gemini capsule
contact, subscriptions for newsletters, steam for...Steam.
The silly thingstopay, which I am never giving up because calling a bank an
confirming your email is "thingstopay" will never stop being funny.
There are two problems with these. The first one is that all messages go to their own folders, which sounds good (don't get a notification for "subscription" emails, for example), except that sometimes I would expect an important email in one of the folders and then this was a curse rather than a blessing. And the second problem is that many times I would forget to reply from the same alias I was receiving the mail, or would change it without realizing. Which would confuse the other person.
Use the same email for 90% of things, and then setup a few rules for mailing lists, and a
couple other items. Use less, not more, folders.
Turns out following advice from people who receive probably hundreds of emails a day was
really stupid for a guy who gets a one random contact and two credit card statements a month.
But...now I sometimes have 8 unread emails in my inbox, and none of them are "important", so I
need to stay on top what I receive a bit more.
So the temptation to divide things again is there, except that I know it won't help.
Maybe it is just that no system is perfect, and some amount of friction is just the way it is. And maybe that is fine. If you care about something, spending two frigging minutes taking care of it daily is more than reasonable.