I am really good at email. I have 230 message filters combined in my work and personal accounts. Between those filters and a ruthless policy of unsubscribing to most marketing emails, my inboxes are beautifully manicured gardens of delight and my archives are glorious memory palaces.
Because I continue to use my inboxes as “To Do” lists, I seldom reach the coveted Inbox (0), and it never lasts long. That’s why something like Superhuman, the invitation-only service aimed at people who spend more than three hours a day on email, caught my interest. But it seems as soon as I heard about Superhuman, the buzz turned bad.
- Would You Pay $30 a Month to Check Your Email? (New York Times) “Some of the app’s features — such as ones that let users undo sending, track when their emails are opened and automatically pull up a contact’s LinkedIn profile — are available in other third-party email plug-ins. But there are bells and whistles that I hadn’t seen before.”
- Superhuman says it will disable email read receipts by default after privacy controversy (The Verge) “Vohra’s apology post is remarkable in that it tackles many of the concerns leveled at read receipts head-on. He admits that Superhuman was using pixel trackers, spells out how they work, admits they could have been abused by bad actors, and generally doesn’t come across as particularly defensive.”
- Superhuman’s Superficial Privacy Fixes Do Not Prevent It From Spying on You (Mike Industries) “The message that sender-controlled read receipts send is ‘I’m watching you, I’ve been watching you, and you didn’t even know it’. Can you imagine ever saying that to someone, in any context, and having it go well?”
- How to Stop Superhuman (and Other Apps) From Tracking Your Email Opens (How-To Geek) “To stop email open tracking, you’ll just need to turn off the ‘automatically load images’ setting in your email client of choice.”
From the Ohio Web Library:
- Duffy, Jill. “5 Ways to Email Better.” PC Magazine, Jan. 2017, p. 100.
- Martin, Nigel, et al. “Expectations of Privacy and Trust: Examining the Views of IT Professionals.” Behaviour & Information Technology, vol. 35, no. 6, June 2016, pp. 500–510.
- Batesole, Brad. “How online analytics work.” Online Marketing Foundations. 29 Jun 2018. https://www.lynda.com/Marketing-tutorials/How-online-analytics-work/693114/760703-4.html.
