I feel like we could be e-mail soulmates!
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Are you all using web email for this, or do you have a favourite desktop / phone client?
This is where Iām at too! I felt cluttered with my old system (multiple emails all using gmail) but since I began learning more about privacy literacy and using proton, Iām going keeping things as tidy as I can since I got to start with a clean slate anyways. It was a breath of fresh air lol
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Right now Iām using browser for the most part. I do have a phone client downloaded but it feels weird writing emails on my phone, so I mostly use that to quickly read and delete non-actionable emails.
For Proton and Gmail I use both web email and the Android apps on the phone. Yahoo and the ISP I use only on the desktop.
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I use mostly the web based clients. Iāve used Thunderbird in the past but now I use Fastmailās web based client and good 'ol Roundcube for the addresses I have through a web hosting plan
I only really use the web versions. I think theyāre the easiest. Anything mobile is a pain in the butt to use by comparison (for anything other than reading), and as cool as Thunderbird is, I mainly use it as a feed reader. I think Iād need to upgrade to a paid account to do anything on desktop with Proton anyway (which is totally worth it, just not exactly in my budget right now).
I filter mercilessly. Incoming mail from corporations goes into a separate folder and is automatically marked as āreadā because corporations are not people and have nothing of value to say. I donāt need to keep getting emails from a business just because I bought something from them once.
Mail from people goes into another folder but remains marked āunreadā until Iāve actually read it. Itās important to me to maintain correspondence with other people, but mail from corporations threatens to drown out mail that actually matters.
The only mail that gets into my inbox is stuff from new correspondents that I havenāt filtered yet ā or spam that Fastmail hasnāt learned to catch on their own.
I have a msn email from when I was 12 that is named after a Slayer album. Thatās a desolate wasteland after 24 years. I barely use it.
I have two Gmail addresses: one is chaos.goat and used for everything, one is firstname.lastname and used only for a few official things.
Then I have my work email.
How do I sort and categorize them? I have a few rules on the work and chaos.goat emails to take care of automated stuff but thatās it. Off the top of my head Iām not sure how many emails are in my personal Gmail but itās north of 70k.
My work email after 6 years has over 100k unread messages with probably that many put into folders automatically and marked read (automated ones) and another 30k or so that have been read/responded to.
I greatly enjoy taking screenshots of my work inbox and using it to give certain coworkers anxiety.
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Fell a little behind on organizing my personal email and my inbox is a little messy. Working on getting some rules created to sort them into their appropriate folders.
Do you know of any good guides to getting started w/ email rules? Iād like to start properly filtering promotional stuff, update stuff, etc etc
Iām not sure I have any guides that would be handy. How you set them up can vary between email/provider or email/client. What do you use? If you used Fastmail like I do I would look for Set up email rules in Fastmail. or replace with your provider or client. Dreamhost had this really weird thing where I had to tell it to delete the original message as it would make a copy that it moved but would leave the original one where it is. Which is why I say they seem to vary
Outside of that I usually just decided where to send the email to what folder based on the senderās email address. Which works well enough and should be possible with every provider/client
Wagh yeah that makes sense; I use Fairmail for mobile and varying portals and platforms on desktop (that I would honestly like to consolidate. I might look into getting a separate email client and just doing it that way lmao).
Itās best to filter them at the service level (via gmail or whichever email provider) if you can, because that way the rules work automatically no matter which client youāre using that day. If you use filtering built into your client those filters will only work when the client is open (though if thatās the only client you ever use then itās not so much of an issue).
Itās such an ongoing battle trying to keep everything filtered. Iāve learned the easiest way to handle it is to always always always protect your main email, and then use different emails for things in such a way that you can still categorise them.
E.G., all my mails end up at my main inbox eventually, but if Iām shopping online on any website those emails are definitely being mailed out to shopping@my-domain.com, so my filter setup is based on which email address a given email was sent to, instead of who they are from. That way I donāt have to edit my filters for each new site, or edit my filters when a website decides to change their from: address or any number of other things they can change over time.
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multiple emails are definitely helpful! I make use of my hosting provider quite a bit for mailboxes. Also agreed, sorry I didnāt explain that well enough but it is definitely better to set your filters up from your provider. I have the Microsoft way of things invade my head sometimes where that was what I supported mainly at work so it was just Outlook+Exchange so you could get away with setting them up in Outlook