I use two email accounts - one personal (managed by iCloud with a custom domain), and one for work (managed by Gmail). The personal address is one that I used for a long time, so unfortunately I get a lot of spam (which iCloud does a passable job at filtering out), notifications, newsletters and other non-critical mail on it. Right now I'm using a pretty basic setup - Mail.app on macOS & iOS that has both my work and personal accounts connected. From time to time I would go on a clean up spree with the personal account but then after few weeks it quickly devolves into a mess of dozens and sometimes hundreds of unread emails because I would not bother to even mark the non-essential stuff as read anymore.
My ideal email system would pre-screen my emails and automatically categorise them, so I would be left with basically four categories: Priority (emails from actual people or stuff that needs immediate response), Notifications (e.g. GitHub, socials, etc.), Paper trail (receipts, invoices, important stuff to archive but not to see immediately) and Newsletters (non-important messages than can be read when I have time for them). It also has to support multiple accounts (so I don't use two different apps for work and personal), work with iCloud and custom domains and have good macOS & iOS clients (I manage my email almost exclusively on desktop, but I need to access it from my mobile at times).
So far I've tested/considered:
- hey.com - they have the pre-screening and the exact categories I mentioned above, which is awesome, I tried it and it worked wonderfully, unfortunately I can't get around the fact that they want me to use their hosting (so they're an email provider, not just an email client) and they don't offer option to use multiple email inboxes (so I don't need to check my work emails separately
- Spike - a very good attempt at an email client, has an unified inbox, has Priority/Other smart inboxes (could use at least one more category, but i would almost settle for that) and a pretty nice iOS client but unfortunately it has a fatal flaw - the messages I send using this client would sometimes be silently not delivered and I would know only after the other party told me that they didn't receive anything (which you might already tell is a very bad thing to happen to you when you send an important time-critical email). I've filed a bug report with them but so far radio silence, so it's a deal breaker for me
- Spark - don't exactly remember what was wrong with this one
- Outlook - yeah, so I even considered a Microsoft solution even though I'm a Mac guy, but unfortunately the iOS client is very bare bones and you cannot set a custom domain alias when you use an iCloud account with them, so that's a no-go
- Superhuman - I've heard a lot good things about it, but unfortunately it only works with Gmail accounts so again, it's a no-go
At this point I'm starting to wonder whether my specific set of requirements are just to narrow to have a good solution and maybe I just need to let go of some of them. I definitely don't want to move to Gmail, as I've already moved out from there a year ago and I'm not looking back.
I. A Filter that automatically applies the label "sub" to any email with the word "unsubscribe." This catches nearly all impersonal emails with very few false positives.
II. A bookmark(let) that filters out emails with that "sub" label. This is often a good place to start searching for more important emails.
III. Two keyboard shortcuts that allow me to achieve "inbox-zero" in less than a second:
1. "*u" selects all unread conversations (custom binding to "1")
2. "I" marks selected emails as read. (custom binding to "2")
I scan the list of unread emails, flagging the interesting one for later, then just hit 1 - 2 on the keyboard. Done!
For everything else, I find search and manual tagging more convenient than categorizing email into bins (like notifications, receipts, newsletters, etc). I tried using Gmail's automatic sorting, but I ended up disabling it.)
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> Superhuman - I've heard a lot good things about it, but unfortunately it only works with Gmail accounts so again, it's a no-go
If using Gmail to interface with your iCloud email is not a deal breaker, you can either have iCloud forward your email or have Gmail "pull" your iCloud email.
But to use them, you have to receive your email at a server where you control the mail delivery agent. Then you can setup rules to automatically sort your emails in any way you like.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language...
Can’t really help with the other stuff though. I think you can set up rules for keywords so your could probably catch a lot of stuff like “receipt”, “invoice” “license” without a lot of effort.
Now 95% of the emails I get are written by a human or otherwise wanted.
I don't need categories, because everything I get is relevant.