When a letter arrives at anna@practice.law, the inbox row wears the stripe of practice.law. When you open the letter, the reply banner wears the same stripe. When you click reply, the From is already anna@practice.law. You did not choose; the address chose you.

7:58 AM

A. Severn

severn@letters.press

via newsletter 2

Re: the quiet commerce of mornings

A note — brief — on the margin. I found your letter folded between two receipts and was grateful for its weight…

1 Stripe

Deterministic colour, one per domain. Stable across browsers and accounts — the stripe you see on your laptop is the stripe you see on your phone.

2 Via-line

The short alias. What tells you which self this letter is addressed to before you've even read the subject.

Fig. 02·Anatomy of a row — stripe at the left, alias via-line below the sender.

§ How colours are picked

Colours are picked deterministically from the domain name — the same string always yields the same colour, across browsers and accounts. That means the stripe you're used to on your laptop is the stripe you see on your phone, with no synchronisation involved. The palette is a set of thirty-two muted, paper-friendly pigments, carefully chosen to be distinguishable even next to each other.

Aside

You can override any domain's colour from /app/domains/<fqdn> — the override stays private to your account and travels with you.

§ The via line

Under every sender, a line of small caps reads via <alias>. The alias is the short, human-readable name for the domain; “studio”, “partners”, “dispatch” in the preview on the landing page. This is the single piece of text that tells you which self a letter is addressed to before you’ve even read the subject.

§ Overriding the From

When you reply, the From is auto-picked from the To of the original letter. In the compose window you can override it with any address bound to your account — a dropdown beside the From shows your full roll of identities. Most days, you will not touch it.

TUE 22 APR·The inbox Hover / ↑↓
If you hit reply now…

The envelope would read

To
anna@cruz-voss.legal
From (auto)
anna@practice.law via partners
Subject
Re: Thursday's filing

Signed in the practice.law key

Fig. 03·Hover a letter (or use ↑↓ on the keyboard). The envelope on the right composes itself — To from the sender, From auto-picked from the address the letter arrived at.

Next, add and verify the domain, review SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, then use the multiple-business email workflow to decide which identities belong in the same reading view.