I’ve got two domain names set up for work and personal email, but I’m absolutely drowning in unread emails, around 4,000. Most are those annoying notifications like “Your security code is xxx,” “Your parcel has shipped,” and requests to rate my experience.
Right now, I’ve been trying out Inbox Zero with an old Gmail account. It’s cool, but honestly feels a bit overkill and only works with Gmail and Outlook. I switched to my own domains to get away from Google in the first place!
So, I’m on the hunt for an email provider that has solid SPAM filters and can create a priority inbox without all the pesky notification clutter. Bonus points if it supports custom domains.
Any suggestions?
Regardless of which e-mail service you end up using, I find that an incredible simple rule to filter all e-mail with the word “unsubscribe” in it’s body to another folder saves your sanity. It’s still a folder you should go through a few times a week to read all the newsletters and shit you’re subscribed to, and sometimes the occasional false positive, but your inbox will mostly contain e-mail you actually want to read. I have another rule that filters mail from specific senders that I want to read immediately to my Inbox before it hits the unsubscribe rule, but those exceptions are uncommon enough (I only have 7 after years of doing this) to not take much work.
This is brilliant. Thanks!
This is a great tip!
Brilliant tip. Thank you
Do you not sign up for any newsletters?
Yes, those go to the “unsubscribe” folder, so I read them less often than my normal mail.
I use the Thunderbird email client to set up filters which send email to set folders.
Same. pfsense will filter a lot of spam with Spamhaus_Drop type feeds. Then T-Bird with a lot of rules for different sorting options. Also, I use a lot of alias email addresses so those are easy to filter right into the trash can. It’s interesting to watch who sells my aliases.
but I’m absolutely drowning in unread emails, around 4,000
WTF are you doing with your e-mail address that you get these amounts of mails. These are more mails than I got in the last decade.
At first maybe try to unsubscribe whatever you subscribed and stop putting your address into random services. Use a temporary mail for stuff like that.
Also mail filters can help with sorting mails from certain senders into folders. Bascially every provider has them and if not programs like Thunderbird have these built in on the client side.
Most are those annoying notifications like “Your security code is xxx,” “Your parcel has shipped,” and requests to rate my experience.
Uhm simply delete them when you e.g. inputted the code or got your parcel? Or change the settings that you no longer get them?
So, I’m on the hunt for an email provider that has solid SPAM filters…
Under your circumstances no provider in the world can do that, because nobody can determine if your “Your security code is xxx” mail is spam or legitimate… YOU have to determike that for yourself.
Don’t unsubscribe, just send to spam. Unsubscribe just confirms you’re a real person and you get put on a list for more spam. Spam folder achieves the same thing without sending any sort of signal back to the sender. Also if enough people flag it, it’ll go in my spam folder automatically. Thank you for your service.
When you’re getting notifications/newsletters from legitimate platforms like e.g. Amazon or GitHub it’s smarter to unsubscribe from these specific mails. Otherwise you will be screwed when some important mail somehow ends up in the spam folder.
Nothing important goes in my email.
Not sure what this sentence means, but feel free to use pigeons instead.
Ah classic IPoAC!
How about using sieve rules? A nice plus is that if you ever move to self-hosted in the future, you can bring it with you.
I know at least Fastmail supports user-configured sieve. I don’t have experience with Fastmail myself but in general mostly heard good things.
https://www.cstrahan.com/blog/taming-email-with-fastmail-rules/
I’m doing trial periods at fastmail, zoho and namecheap (fronting for titan ).
Zoho will fail back to a low volume, web only version if the bill doesn’t get paid while the others just stop working.Those were pretty much the top three I found across all the “top 10” reviews I could find – aside from the ones that obviously cater to spamming (marketing) customers.
Would love to see reasons for/against them.
I’ve been using Zoho for about 6 months and have no complaints. I pay about $12 a year for a couple of gigs of storage - not a huge amount, but enough for personal email as long as you delete stuff fairly regularly.
You can create up to 30 email aliases, which I use a lot. For instance, I have an email address for newsletters, a couple for generic web logins, and then some specific ones for important accounts such as banking.
It’s easy to make filters to sort email as it arrives. This is how I handle the “priority inbox” situation. Any email from my family or other important senders is all put into a single folder, and I have an email app on my phone which checks this folder and notifies me of new mail. All other mail is either moved by other filters e.g. newsletters or just left in the inbox.
One of these can just be solved with a mailbox rule within the email client itself for what it’s worth. Make a rule that’s based on keywords in the subject line and have them moved into a folder that you clear out every couple of months. Downside is the email client need to be running/opened for it to process them.
