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?
I’m not self hosting email but my rule is that no email gets to be in the inbox except for VERY rare exceptions
When an email lands in my inbox, I immediately make a rule that labels it correctly and moves it the fuck away from my inbox.
This way I can have notifications on for inbox emails and they’ll either be important or a new sender whose next email will end up labeled and NOT in my inbox
I switched to Fastmail about 2 years ago and have been happy with it. Does everything I want and it is quick and smooth like it’s name.
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.
I have no idea, it’s an old email I used for a lot of services before I knew about email aliases like Mozilla relay.
Like I said, most of them are useful once, like a shipping notification or a sign in security code. But most of the time I just copy the code from the desktop notification and leave the email. I don’t know why so many services moved from a password based login to email security codes, it’s annoying that’s for sure.
I’ll try to set up some filters to delete them after a day.
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’ve been using Sieve on Dovecot (Pidgeonhole) for years and it’s great. Earlier I had Procmail, which is fine, too. The only disadvantage is that I’d need to login on my server to edit the rules, while Sieve is directly editable in email clients.
Echoing the base principle I see in other comments: proactively limit what can land in your inbox. I have a rule in Fastmail that only mail from senders in my contacts gets to inbox. If no rules apply, mail ends up in the firewall folder, which I check periodically.
I’ve been on a big unsubscribe wave for newsletters and notifications that I had previously opted into. If I haven’t been reading them within a week, they get dropped. Next step is to resume use of RSS for the topics I want to periodically check up on instead of crowding my email.
The other base principle is to segregate email addresses for personal correspondence and interactions with companies/services/accounts. I’ve not been good about that out of laziness. That’s more about data privacy and while most of my FnF still use gmail it is moot.
I use my own version of inbox zero.
I manually archive emails I might need in the future (like rent payment confirmations, job position applications that got past the screening interview, official correspondence with local administrative bodies, and very few other things).
I keep things that need action or are ongoing in the inbox (like online orders until they arrive, event tickets).
I delete useless emails (newsletters, code confirmations, online order emails or event tickets once the order arrives or the event passed) possibly preceded by unsubscribing.
That’s it, I usually have 0 to 3 emails in my inbox. No plugins, no filters.
This is the way.
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.
i just switched to proton and I’m already annoyed that I can’t create or modify filter rules from the app
also they group conversations in thread even if they are clearly not a thread, like login codes or other notifications.
I’m chronically bad at not marking emails as read and suffer the same bloat. For handing emails security codes and shipping notifications,I use Proton mails Sieve filters.
Specifically I make it where these type of emails automatically get deleted after 7-30 days based on subject
I can recommend the Spark Desktop email client, you can use it for free and without subscribing.
This is not strictly a self hosting answer, but given the problem you are describing, I think it is still relevant.
If you are already comfortable using an LLM based tool to manage email, take a look at SaneBox (this is not an LLM).
It is not an email provider and not an email client. It sits behind the scenes and works with almost any provider that supports IMAP, including custom domains. All the filtering, prioritization, and notification cleanup happens server side, so you keep your existing setup.
It excels specifically at what you are struggling with: automatically separating real human email from receipts, shipping notices, one time codes, and low value notifications, without forcing you into Inbox Zero workflows or Gmail specific features.
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!
Brilliant tip. Thank you
Do you not sign up for any newsletters?
You can manually add an exception to the rule for trusted senders.
Yes, those go to the “unsubscribe” folder, so I read them less often than my normal mail.
you can use kill-the-newsletter to receive those via rss
Doesn’t work, in my experience.
This is a great tip!
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.
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.
Did anyone try CLI clients, like (neo)mutt for that? I expect it can be set up on a server (if we consider self-hosting) and do this job automatically. While all the AI thingy feels like magic, my practical experience shows that there are just some keywords or even just the sender, with which mails can be sorted.
It sounds like notmuch is your bag. While it has its own CLI, it also works great with neomutt, aerc, and others.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=pBs_P_1--Os
You can also do very powerful presorting with sieve if your server supports it.
Thanks for not much, I have never heard of it before.
You can do most of that without any fancy AI or machine learning: Since you already have your own domain, setup some mail redirects and filter all mails going into them into subfolders. I have a redirect for onlineshopping where all those order confirmation and delivery informations and unwanted newsletters go. I have another I use for creating accounts - all 2FA etc. are going there. And then I have the main mail for actual communication and another redirect for all those interesting substack newsletters and so on.
