I thought some detail about how Iāve configured my preferred iPadOS email client, Preside to work in a similar way might be in order.
Preside is an amazing power-user email application for iOS. The application features a myriad of options. The hardest thing about configuring Preside is knowing where the particular setting or customisation might be found within its many nested folders of preferences and settings. What I have found is that my configuration has taken some time and has come together piece-by-piece as I discover another element of Presideās functionality. Even now, I donāt consider my customisation of Preside done. Iām sure I will continue to tweak it.
Iām going to focus on my use of Preside on iPad. While Preside works just the same on iPhone, its settings donāt sync across the platforms. Itās been so hard to get the iPad settings right that I donāt even want to try to replicate it on iPhone. But thereās nothing stopping my approach from working on either platform. I beg of developer Rich Waters - please give us some method to sync settings!
With that preamble taken care of, on with the show.
Dashboard View
My Preside dashboard looks as such:
You see a number of favourite folders and smart searches across the top. A list view of emails down the left hand sidebar and the email content on the right.
How did I get the setup to look exactly this way? I wish I could tell you. Again, with Presideās settings being so deep, I canāt exactly remember what toggles I flipped to get it looking this way. Iām sorry. I wish I could do better.
I can only show the following setting screen that shows how I have enabled the smart search folders:
My Preside Configuration
You will note that a number of the folders have āsnowflakeā icons next to them. Thatās a feature of Preside, in that each folder can be assigned a ātypeā. So Iāve assigned each of my SaneBox-managed folders as a context. This means that Preside will check those folders in the same way that it checks the Inbox, meaning my unread counts are up-to-date.
This screenshot shows the representation of these folders within my IMAP structure:
Looking at this, I notice I havenāt configured my Paper Trail as a context. Maybe this is something I need to resolve.
The āFocus & Replyā and āSet Asideā buttons along the top bar of my Dashboard are saved searches. They look for emails that have an IMAP tag assigned to them. You might recall in my post about MailMate, Iāve set up a toolbar button that will add these tags to a chosen email. As these tags are synchronised at the server level via Fastmail, Preside can see them, and the tag can be used as a variable in a saved smart search folder, as Iāve done.
What is great about Preside is that it too can apply IMAP tags. I use the ālightning boltā quick action to do this. I highlight the mail I might wish to āSet Asideā or āFocus & Replyā and choose the āTagā option. This brings up a picker of IMAP tags that I can apply, so I just choose which one I want to use.
This is a snapshot into how the āFocus & Replyā smart search was configured:
And here is an example of how I enabled a SaneBox-managed āPaper Trailā folder to show:
Desktop Level Email Features on iPad
With this configured I feel Iām very close to the holy grail of a macOS level email workflow on iOS.
Iāve tried many email clients. Some are rudimentary (Outlook). Some are unreliable (Mail.app). Some have opinionated design and callbacks to their own servers (Spark). Some are ridiculously expensive (Superhuman).
Preside is easily the greatest, most complicated and somewhat ugly email client on iOS. It has grown on me the way an ugly dog might find a way into your heart. You know it isnāt cute, but darn it if it doesnāt sit when itās told and bring the ball back every time. Itās an email application that can learn new tricks - then you look back and donāt remember how you taught it. I want to give Preside a good old tickle behind the ear.
Well, Iāve set up my Hey.com email address on a 14 day trial. ācanionā at hey dot com it is.
My friends are enablers, encouraging me to buy Steam games. Shame on them.
recently released testing data revealing that upon launch, COVIDSafe logged encounters 25 per cent or less between locked iPhones. After a series of updates and improvements, this figure is now between 25 to 50 per cent.
A switch to using the official tracing architecture within the Android/iOS platforms seems a sensible move to me.
These are my thoughts on the 2020 Apple WWDC keynote, presented in the order they occurred as I watched the show.
I’ve not yet read any other feedback so these thoughts are non-affected by groupthink:
General
The stagecraft and direction that Apple puts into these shows is amazing.
iOS
Widgets on the home screen - finally!
The new messages is great but still relies on everybody having iOS. Many of my friends are Android users, so I end up having to rely on WhatsApp. Even my attempts to transition them to Telegram or Signal failed.
That’s a kick ass wheelchair that lady owns.
No new maps for me In Australia.
iPadOS
Sidebars - like a Mac!
Search on the iPad seems like LaunchBar on the Mac, but it will probably be more like Spotlight, that is, not quite as good.
The new Pencil and Scribble feature looks great
Apple Watch & AppleTV
The scientific capability in Apple is incredible; the resources they can plough into movement sensing for exercise, surround sound, etc. is crazy.
Home
Yes! Adaptive lighting. I’ve got some LifX bulbs and that app has dawn/dusk settings, but this looks way better.
Is it time for me to get some security video cameras for the house? Whcih ones are best and most future proof?
macOS
Apple have done translucent menu bars before. I still don’t like them.
The spaced out menus are ugly.
I wish I had friends who lived this perfect Apple experience of sharing ETAs with me, sending memojies, etc. It doesn’t happen in my world.
I’ve been trialling a bunch of different browsers over the past week. Safari might win me back just in time.
Apple Silicon
Of course it’s not called ARM Macs.
Apple have built a hell of a competitive moat with Apple Silicon.
Talk of Linux virtualisation but not Windows. I reckon that must be gone.
Iāve fully Rogue Amoebafied my Mac with Audio Hijack, Fission, Farrago, Loopback, SoundSource. Send help! // @rogueamoeba
I tried out Otter.ai today which does voice to text transcription, recognising the different speakers. Itās kind of amazing, but Iām not confident of the privacy policy.
I wonder if @Fastmail have any idea of the love for them on micro.blog. They should drop in and say hi. In the words of @cheri, we would probably all throw our tech panties at them.
I edited my forthcoming podcast with a trial version of Hindenburg Journalist. It took some getting used to coming from Ferrite and itās direct manipulation with the Apple Pencil. The main missing feature I noticed was ripple delete. Iām tempted to buy a license, though.
To do this I created a new Smart Mailbox with the following mailbox filtering criteria:
Furthermore, in the same mailbox configuration window, but under the ‘Submailboxes’ tab be sure to select the checkbox to create submailboxes, and choose an appropriate filter. For creating People Pages, I went with the ‘From | Name’ option.
My thanks to Martin for drawing this omission to my attention, and I hope this helps others.
It was fun and surprising to be listening to the latest episode of Mac Power Users (540) and hear my older review of MailMate mentioned and linked in the show notes.
Iām contemplating shutting down my ad hoc blot.im blog over at canion.me and bringing it all over to micro.blog. Any reason not to do so? Then what do I do with the canion.me domain? Decisions, decisions…
2021-11-28: I’ve updated this post in an effort to correct what were missing images. With thanks to @chrisl_at for letting me know of the problem.
Basecamp has released their much-anticipated1 take on email, Hey. As a long-time fan of Basecamp and a light user of their Basecamp Personal2 product I was interested to see how they were going to address the issue of email.
First off, Hey looks beautiful. Beyond looks it has a number of interesting features to support a healthier and more efficient email workflow.
Hey is a subscription service and I have no issue with this whatsoever. I already pay for email services, preferring to be a customer of an email service provider, rather than the product itself3. I’m a happy user of Fastmail which I use in conjunction with SaneBox, MailMate on my iMac, and Preside on iOS.
For my purposes then, I’m not looking for an email service that will allow me to migrate away from a free-of-charge provider.
Herein lies the problem, at least in terms of me being a customer of Hey. Hey is a standalone service. Unlike a typical email provider it doesn’t expose an IMAP interface which other apps can use. If it did this, it would probably lose all the pretty add-ons they have built into the system. Furthermore it doesn’t allow the use of a custom domain. You get a nice @hey.com email address but you can’t BYO a domain name. A key part of my email infrastructure is owning my domain and emails form a component of that. Moving to Hey would mean stepping away from that lovely setup. I like owning @andrewcanion.com and @canion.me.
For these reasons I quickly ascertained that Hey was not a product for me.
That’s not to say that it doesn’t have some clever workflows, and it does look pretty. I can’t replicate the pretty, but in watching the walkthrough demo by Jason Fried I was fairly certain I could replicate most of the functionality.
So to satisfy my own curiosity I worked with the products I already have - SaneBox and MailMate - to see if I could construct a Hey-style workflow.
Let’s step through the way I built my copy-cat workflow.
Triage - Yes or No
Hey lets you select whether new users will be added to your inbox (they call it an “Imbox” but I’m not going there).
I use SaneBox for this instead. It does the same sort of triage, using machine learning to determine whether a sender is important to you or not. If it thinks they are, it goes to your inbox. If not, it goes to an alternative “SaneLater” folder.
I have enabled notifications only for email that lands in my Inbox, so that matches the ‘quiet by design’ feature of Hey.
Focus & Reply
Within Hey, this is a neat bundle of messages that are tagged to be dealt with later, most ideally in a focused session of email. They sit as a little visual stack at the bottom of the window. I can’t match the visuals, but I should be able to match the functionality with MailMate.
I’ve created a new Smart Mailbox, named Focus & Reply that looks across All Messages, and filters as per these conditions:
Note the keyword designation. MailMate lets you apply keywords to any email. To make this easier, I’ve added a keywords toolbar to MailMate, and have it set to showing the two that are relevant to the Hey-style workflow. I have a magnifying glass for Focus & Reply, and a pushpin for Set Aside.
Now, if I click the icon on any email thread, it is tagged accordingly. I’ve enabled a column to show the keywords, so an email might look like this - note the magnifying glass:
Now only emails that I’ve tagged by clicking the magnifying glass will appear in the Focus & Reply smart mailbox.
Set Aside
In Hey, Set Aside is designated for mail that you want to reference later. These emails are also taken away from the Inbox view.
As with Focus & Reply, I’ve set the pushpin tag to act as the determinant. Together with another Smart Search, I’ve got this group of emails configured as such:
But to get the workflow where these are ‘out of view’ in my regular Inbox, I need to configure my Inbox view as well. So I’ve created an Unread Inbox, that works on a series of mailboxes and applies a condition to only show unread mail, as such:
Now if I want to reference my Set Aside email, I can click the relevant Mailbox in the Sidebar.
The Feed
Hey uses a concept of The Feed almost like a social media scroll of email incorporating newsletters, advisories and all the other non-timely information we get via email.
I created this with the help of SaneBox. All my The Feed smart folder does is show me the contents of the default SaneBox SaneNews folder. It generally knows what should go in there, and I can train it as I go simply by moving mail into that folder as I see fit.
Paper Trail
The Paper Trail in Hey is for receipts, invoices, and other such transactional information.
Here, I created a custom SaneBox folder to replicate this feature. As I get receipts and things, I will move a few into this email folder and SaneBox will quickly learn and take care of them for me in the future.
Other Email
For now, I’m still using the SaneLater mail folder to catch other less-important email. Looking at Hey, it seems email can only go to the Inbox, The Feed or The Paper Trail.
So for now, I’ve either got more features, or more confusion. Yet to be determined which that is.
People Pages
Hey has a concept of people pages where you can see everything that relates to a single individual.
MailMate has me covered quite well here although it doesn’t look as pretty as what Hey has achieved.
You will note from the image of my MailMate sidebar above that I have a People Pages folder. When I expand that, MailMate shows me a folder for each individual sender. Click any of those and only email from that person shows in the main window. The image below shows this, with disguised names for privacy reasons.
With that, I’ve got a focused view of each person as well.
2020-06-17: I have created an addendum to this post, providing some more detail as to how to create the People Pages smart mailbox.
Attachments
Hey surfaces attachments and looks to do a great job of this.
I am sure that MailMate can do some kind of filtering based on attachment content, but I couldn’t figure out a combination that would get this to work effectively4.
However, SaneBox offers the option to connect to a cloud storage provider and save email attachments to a folder in that storage. Optionally, it can strip the attachments from the original email.
I created a connection to OneDrive and now SaneBox is saving email attachments there. To enhance search even further, I’m indexing that folder in DEVONthink which unlocks the myriad ways of searching and surfacing that DEVONthink offers, while keeping everything neatly in a folder structure.
Fastmail also offers the ability to save attachments to its storage space. I chose OneDrive because I wanted sync to my local drive. OneDrive was the best option as I have the most storage with it, and I’m off Dropbox now that their client has become bloat-ware. That’s not to say the OneDrive client for Mac is good - it isn’t. If only iCloud Drive was an option…
Stickies, Notes and Renaming Threads
Hey has me beat here. I haven’t identified a way to create notes against single emails. However this has never been a problem for me in the past. I use a combination of OmniFocus/Drafts/NotePlan to make notes and this is working for me.
The renaming of a thread is nice too, but again, not something I’ve ever felt the need for.
Summary
In summary, I think Hey is great. I wish them every success. If it offered the ability to work with my existing infrastructure, I’d be tempted. But as it is now the service isn’t right for me.
Yet the workflow is solid. By replicating the structure with the combination of tools that I already own/subscribe to I can benefit from the method of work, without the prettiness. I’m okay with that.
At least in my small nerd corner of the internet. ↩︎
I’ve long intended to write a blog post about my use of Basecamp Personal. One day… ↩︎
Gmail isn’t actually free, as in beer, you know? ↩︎
If anybody knows how to do this, please let me know. I welcome feedback. ↩︎
This is a test of the new prototype embedding system on micro.blog.
Embedding microblog posts with Quotebacks manton.org
It’s great to have new features to play with.
I’ve got a week that features 3-hour Zoom meetings each day. This article by @rogueamoeba is saving my ears.
