Email Advice to Corporations (and You!)

Mark McWiggins 2024

NOT copyrighted … please share widely.

I have decades of experience with email … I first got an email address in college in the early 1980’s and I was hooked.

My wife and I started with Google’s gmail, the free service that came out in 2004 … but my wife never met an email she didn’t like and kept everything that came in! Gmail worked well for us for years, but at some point they began throttling our mail! I wound up putting a layer of spam filtering in front of their email with my own mail server software to keep it going, but it wasn’t ideal.

We eventually moved to Protonmail, a paid service out of the Czech republic where you have to pay for storage and can upgrade as needed. This is better than a free service like Gmail that can decide out of the blue to reduce your bandwidth whenever they feel like it.

Protonmail has mostly worked well, with two exceptions: Search … sort of works, but much much slower than Gmail’s … and spam filtering .. which is really an impossible problem to solve the general case (see below). But Gmail’s filtering was better than Protonmail’s.

I finally saw the actual solution in the New York Times earlier this year: hey.com email. They had the insight: spam is in the eye of the beholder.

Advice for recruiters especially: why pay for a service to screen applicants out before you have even seen their applications? Workday’s is particularly bad, asking for race and other stuff to potentially screen workers out before their email ever gets to a recruiter. I emailed ProPublica to see if they could investigate this practice.

So for companies recruiting, they should have several aliases:

jobs@yourcompany.com

gripes@yourcompany.com

help@yourcompany.com

and so forth … short English and Spanish aliases .. ayuda@yourcompany.es … and so forth.

Please let me know if this works for you and what your A/B recruting test shows!

Mark McWiggins

425–369–8286