I’ve noticed that, particularly on the sub-reddit, a lot of people mention email as a hard requirement for their phone. This is apparently enough of a big deal that Sunbeam released a version of their phones with email support this year.
I personally have never really used email on my phone, even back when I had a smart phone. I’m an academic, so email is pretty important to me, but I’ve always been able to get by with just using it when I was at my computer.
If you are somebody who does need email on your phone, I’m curious about your use case. What makes you consider it a must-have feature?
I can’t comment on “needing” email on my phone, as I don’t initially plan on loading an email client onto my Mudita Kompakt. While that may change, I hope it’s the case that I can manage by checking my mailbox via my computer. People managed that way for many years! That said, it may be the case that not being able to access e.g. verification codes will become problematic, but I guess I’ll find out soon enough.
That’s a good point about the auth codes. I was lucky enough that all of the services that I use authentication codes for (GitHub, Microsoft Accounts, Fastmail, etc.) support Yubikeys. So I just switched over to using that.
I don’t literally have email on my phone but on my tablet I use Delta Chat. With all newsletters and mailing lists filtered out (I have another app for them), only personal apps. So if someone wants to reach me it’s email. Our emails are short like once sentence. This post is longer than most of our emails. “Wanna hang out today and play Scrabble?” That kinda thing. Or even sad family news is email, it’s all email.
Email is a messenger that no one corporation owns. And it’s a remarkable technology having been successfully maintained and improved for so long. With DKIM, TLS, PGP, it’s so different from how it was in the 1980s.
The biggest disappointment (not the only) with the InkPalm is how I haven’t gotten it to run Delta Chat so when I’m on it I use SSH to read my emails instead. Which isn’t as nice.
I’d love to have Delta Chat on a dumbphone. The biggest counter-argument is that it’s better to do email at home with a real keyboard. But if the email is “wanna hang out today and play Uno” or “I missed the train” from someone who’s local, I don’t wanna miss that. Probably gonna set up an SMS forwarder for allowlisted email like maybe three people can get on the list and then I only turn on the forwarder when I am away (or in the garden) for a few hours. Any less than that and I’ll see it soon enough anyway, any more than that (like I’m away a month or so) I’d want to bring a tablet.
I set up email on my Cingular Flex 2. While I usually check mail on my computer, if needed I like to be able to check shipping and delivery status when expecting the arrival of an online order.