> I unsubscribe to everything I do not absolutely need.
This right here is one of the greatest quality-of-life improvements I ever adopted. Every single email you get, if you don’t absolutely want it, find and click the unsubscribe link in the footer.
(Standard disclaimer, don’t click links in spam. Only do this for senders who got your address through some kind of legitimate purchase or account sign-up.)
Each time you buy something, and they send you that first “hey why not buy something else too?“ message, unsubscribe. It takes a bit of discipline, but it pays dividends.
It is possible to get to a point where you hardly receive any mail. You can get to inbox zero doing this. It’s genuinely refreshing.
Sometimes I catch a glimpse of other people’s inboxes and, my god, I can’t imagine going back to that life.
I do something similar, but: if I buy something and get a "why not buy something else?" email, I don't just unsubscribe; I mark it as spam. I am careful to never opt in to messages like that, so if I am receiving them then they are my address beyond the consent that I provided, so I want Gmail to downrank their trust.
I agree that either of these approaches pays dividends. I feel great about it.
I do this too - if you're sending me unsolicited emails, and you're not specifically a human reaching out for a genuine human relationship free of me paying you, then your email is spam.
I have 4 filters:
1) I have a 10% membership discount to the local pet store. They have a weekly newsletter that I really don't care about. I once tried unsubscribe, and their dumb system deleted my account. So now I mark as read + archive their newsletter. It's the cost of cheap pet food.
2) I get some spam emails with recurring themes that my spam filter somehow fails to learn after dozens of manual labellings. So I've made filters to mark those as spam.
3) I set up DKIM for my domain, but I really don't care. So all my DKIM reports end up in a subdirectory I never look at.
4) I forward deductible receipts to receipts@mydomain so that I can send myself emails for later when I do accounting. I don't need to check this inbox regularly, because I'm the only one using it. It's a bit crude, but I have certain accounts in certain stores that won't let me change my email address (who seriously still uses email address as primary key?) so I forward those emails automatically to my receipts@ email.
Other than that, my inbox is for PERSONAL EMAIL. I LOVE when I get letters! They're either genuinely interesting, or they contain an "unsubscribe" link at the bottom. The only newsletters I've enjoyed for more than a few months is Haskell Weekly and This Week in Rust. I don't always read them, but they're sort of my "membership magazines".
re 3: are you talking about DMARC reports? I was under the impression those were opt in by adding rua=mailto:<email address> in the DNS record. If you remove that you should not be getting them.
My main rule is moving any email containing « unsubscribe » in /newsletter. Life changing.
If you send me an unwanted newsletter or marketing-email, you'll receive multiple AI generated fake support tickets from various email addresses, every couple of days.
I want that! How does it work? Did you automate that?
Absolutely. That's been my MO for years. Inbox zero across multiple different emails. It makes things really easy
Agreed on all points.
A step further, which I haven't personally tried but I've been thinking about, is to set up a filter rule that just automatically deletes anything with "unsubscribe" or "manage your preferences" in it. If you're already at a zero inbox and getting very few emails per day, this just isn't necessary, but I'd recommend it for someone who has a dumpster fire of an inbox that's getting hundreds of marketing or automatic notification emails per day.
At some point email went from a true communication avenue to just “sending this for reference”. Apps and services are adding their own notification inboxes and comment threads (or activity logs) and @-mentions as an interaction pattern so that they can enrich and embed communication in the context of what they do.
I won’t go so far as to say that email is dying, but it’s certainly changing in purpose.
As someone who enjoys corresponding with old friends and distant family via email (as opposed to, like, text messages or social media comments), I feel like this trend has ruined my ability to do so. It seems like people - who've given up and let their inboxes become flooded - just don't even look in their inboxes for legitimate, personal correspondence anymore.
> It seems like people ... just don't even look in their inboxes for legitimate, personal correspondence anymore
I disagree with that - in my experience sending persona correspondence to my friends/family are generally received and read.
It does seem like people really want the "like (with an emoji)" funcitonality of the rest of the web in email ... Gmail and Outlook are building it in, but unless you're in their walled gardens it does not work great (i.e. email reply: "X has ed your message")
Don't use filter rules to sort mail; after unsubscribing from everything you possibly can, use filter rules to even more aggressively auto-delete or block stuff that you really don't need to see.
You should end up getting so few emails that it's easy to read them all in one inbox or folder and subsequently reply, take a note, and manually delete them to get back to zero.
> I unsubscribe to everything I do not absolutely need
I get like 500 daily messages between multiple email accounts, and this just does not scale. Some messages are needed once year, monthly, some weekly, some are fed into LLM and automation. It is very convenient to have everything organized into folders.
I really have no time, to look for some esoteric details, in some obscure report, on website that stopped working 5 years ago! I just use full text search over my local email archive!
It also keeps paper trail. If GitHub goes down, or I get fired, I still have most comments and decisions.
Without email I would start reinventing alternatives like RSS.
This. I receive several hundred non-junk emails every day. I don't need to read all of them at the time, but I do need to receive them. Many of them lend themselves to some form of segmentation.
No idea how I'd realistically manage it without rules/folders/etc. Even when I try "one inbox, just use search" that inevitably results in saved searches, which is, practically speaking, the same as rules/folders/etc.
How many emails do you think you could have unsubscribed from while typing your reply? You're going to check your email daily for years to come. Why not cull a few every now and then?
> It also keeps paper trail. If GitHub goes down, or I get fired, I still have most comments and decisions.
You obviously keep/archive the important things...
I actually have to make money. Deleting everything is a bit nihilistic.
And I am not going to unsubscribe from daily status reports on my servers. Those are not "absolutely needed", but it is better to have them locally in my email. Landing all incoming emails into inbox just does not scale!
I was getting at culling surplus/extraneous things you had subscribed to, but if all 500 emails are needed, you do you (and make that money with a heavy cognitive load!)
But it is not heavy cognitive load. Thanks to filters and automation...
I get like 20 emails daily that get through filters, land in my inbox and need my urgent attention. I can not imagine being directly exposed to unfiltered stream of junk, and trying to fish out emails from my boss.
Well that only works for personal email unfortunately. In a corporate environment you often don't have an ability to unsubscribe from unwanted mail like those mandatory trainings or production alerts
This is what filter rules are for. See my other comment.
I agree with the article 100%. There are still emails you can't unsubscribe from and shouldn't report as spam or block, for example your monthly bank statement email. It's sad that you can't turn these off as the bank is required to send them. For these cases I do set a "send to trash" rule. If using iCloud, note that rules you set locally on your Mac only run if the Mac is on. To have them run on the server they need to be set on iCloud Mail online, which gives a very limited way to set rules but just barely good enough for these rare occasions.
I recently decided to keep my email filters, because they're still working for me.
On my personal laptop, which folder of mine an incoming email lands in:
* Trash -- All those "new device" emails that sites have started sending every time I log in from the same IP address as always, because I don't preserve their cookies (congrats, you've made security worse), plus Fedex (who won't let me unubscribe from marketing emails). I might look at this every few weeks, briefly.
* Junk -- Detected spam by my email hoster, plus emails from people not in my addressbook (with a few exclusions, such as for certain domains). I have to check this folder every couple days, briefly.
* Lower -- Emails matching large list of rules for senders/subjects I know I don't see soon as they arrive, but will check this folder at least once a day.
* Inbox -- Everything remaining after the rules applied, which is generally emails from people I know, and things I know I want to see promptly, and new unknown stuff from addresses in my addressbook (of 11K entries). This is the only folder that triggers any kind of notification to me, and it's a fairly low-disruption notification.
That's for personal. My work email setups vary by employer/client, but I always get notifications of emails by default from anyone in the company, partners, customers, etc., so I can be responsive. Then slowly add rules to exclude notifications from those of employer/client/partner/customer things that you know don't need prompt attention (like a noisy SaaS announcing every change in a high-traffic repo or wiki).
Most email strategies I read about, assume some premises that don't apply to me:
- Web mail
- IMAP
- Phone
In this case, trying to apply TFA to my job is also impossible, since the article implies that I can unsubscribe from the dozens of notifications someone thought it was a good idea to CC the whole department. Thanks God for filters!
At home I do filter too, sometimes I've found useful stuff in 20 y.o. messages. Of course, YMMV.
No, you gotta keep at least the X-Phishtest filter (or whatever vendor your company uses for stupid phishtests), at a minimum.
Since I started using imapfilter [1] on my server and „aggressive unsubscribe“, email is good again. I added a shortcut to my aerc configuration [2] which adds the sender of a selected mail to a file which imapfilter reads to move it in a folder. It’s so convenient now it can handle hundreds of mails over several mail accounts fully automated.
A friend taught me to create a Smart Folder in Mail to show messages in inbox that contain the string “unsubscribe”.
Then you unsubscribe.
I try to keep inbox zero, so it flags all new email that needs unsubscribing. It’s a very helpful trick.
I've forgotten when, but it has been a while; I've been with just "Unread" and "Flagged," which are built-in filters of Apple Mail. The "Flagged" ones are the ones I focus on, while the "Unread" is done, forgotten, or "Flagged."
Whichever you use, invest time in learning the shortcuts, and things go pretty smoothly. My mail client is, thus, pretty clean most of the time.
https://cdn.oinam.com/img/oinam/brajeshwar-apple-macos-mail-...
In Gmail, I try to archive or delete everything that I’m done with, but it’s difficult to keep up with many notifications flowing in, which I don’t delete immediately or are relevant for the next few days and I never get back to. It’s easy to get behind.
I’ll try your approach of setting up a default section for ‘is:starred OR is:unread’ and stop bothering with the archive step.
If you look at it, everything is eventually archived. You have to stop looking at it; hence the `is:starred OR is:unread`.
I don't delete emails except for ephemeral transactional emails. I still have emails from the early 2000s and have surprised people by replying from then or continuing a conversation, reminding them that we talked way back in time.
I use notmuch and emacs on my main workstation and I have three saved searches only: inbox, unread, and archive. inbox is for when I need an already read mail, and archive is where everything goes when I’ve finished with them in the short term (I don’t delete mails). If I need something, I can always do a more advanced search.
There is a category of spam emails where clicking unsubscribe links ends up signaling spammers that email address is in use and leads to even more spam emails. I wish there was an option to really block such emails and not put them in spam or trash folders. Going even further, each spam email sender should be forced to make a small payment to get their spam delivered to my inbox.
This is the way.
Search basically nullifies the need to organize/group messages in subfolders. I practice similar email hygiene as the author; everything goes through the mental flow chart:
Does this need to be worked? Keep in Inbox. Otherwise…
Does this need to be saved? Archive.
Else? Unsubscribe and/or Delete
I also have no filters. But I don't use Gmail tabbed inbox, either. Do people know you can disable this? I ask because "forfeiting agency to their algorithm" doesn't make sense to me. It sounds like the author isn't familiar with the product.
Turning off tabbed inbox was huge in helping me get down to zero emails. It got me back to one stream of data to watch and manage. Something comes in, I see it and process it. It also made the number of unread easier to reason about.
I do use filters now, but haven't always because I was always looking for a "move to label" option in the "Create Filter" dialog. Instead, Gmail calls that "Archive," which I assumed sent it to the Negative Zone of some special compressed archive. I'm an idiot, for years I just assumed Google didn't build a move feature into it's filters.
[That said, I do find Gmail (and other Google UIs) to be full of little points of frustration like this. Maybe others have had better luck with it, but Tabbed Inbox almost feels like it's designed to make me ineffective.]
I said the same thing when they launched it. It was a poor man's copy of the much better concept of "bundles" from the Inbox product. Bundles made it easier to cope with your email by only surfacing those categories once per day. Tabbed inboxes makes it harder by putting a notification badge in your face all the time.
Ah. I never had Inbox, so now it makes some sense to me (at least from a historical perspective.)
yes, this is exactly what I do. My email should be practically empty unless something is on fire.
I think this is a good choice.
Search don't sort.
No more of your filters. But your mail host is still filtering out things and deciding which emails you will see and which you will not. Even freedom loving Proton mail does it. Gmail and MSOffice365 are terrible about silently dropping legitimate emails.
It's not easy to set up but a personal mailserver is the only way to know you'll actually receive mail people send you. Getting other mailservers to accept your mail is different and harder problem, of course.
To my knowledge Gmail never "silently drops" anything. Every message is either delivered, rejected with the appropriate SMTP failure codes, or bounced with a non-delivery report in case of technical failure to promptly deliver.
During the Solarwinds event I saw them silently drop emails. During normal times they simple accept the mail and refuse to show it to the user (marking it "spam" and hiding it in non-inbox folders); a "shadow drop". Far worse than doing what is expected (if it really were spam, which it usually isn't) which is to refuse the email following standard protocols.
Which "they" are we talking about? Microsoft for sure drops emails silently without delivering them.
Google's GMail (re: shadow drops). But re: silent drops I am specifically referring to Google's Gmail platform as was providing email hosting service for all noaa.gov email addresses and the silent dropping of emails sent to noaa.gov.
