I declared "email bankruptcy" last week for > 1500 "new" messages, scouring them as best I could for things that needed a response, but these were very few. Most messages were nonsense. Organization-wise messages that can mostly be ignored and 80% spam (my workplace uses Google's ecosystem for mail etc so spam should be filtered well!)
After "bankruptcy" I buckled down and determined to deal with each batch of mail first thing and last think each day, ubsubscribing one by one to slowly stop the problem, but the shear volume of marketing crap & process of unsubscribing etc took so long that after two days of spending 45+ minutes dealing with it I had to move on to pressing projects. On top of that it seemed like some unsubscribes immediately generated a near identical spam message for something similar, albeit a different domain, as if the unsubscribe system is just feeding those unsubscribe emails to the next marketing link in the chain in a never ending chain of spam!
How are people managing this? Is there a tool, anything, any idea people use to overcome the shear avalanche of crap without missing the important things? My boss loves me, knows I work hard and am busy, but is sometimes having to remind me to respond to something I completely missed among all this crap. I need a solutiont!
Thank you!
So here I am a week later with 400+ messages in my inbox again!
Personally, I don't really get what's so hard about it. I have a few rules that filter out total automated garbage/noise. That leaves me with a few hundred emails each day - I spend 5 or 10 minutes scanning through those looking for important people/topics and click into them if they seem interesting, and after I've done that, I mark all as read... and do it all again the next day.
Often, I find something that is interesting/important, and I chat it to other people in the team, i.e., "RE: Question from important client about new feature not working <---- Did you see this email?" and they're like no... I didn't get that, who was it sent to? It was sent to The impression I have is that these people are not willing to even spend 5 or 10 minutes a day scanning, or they have attempted to set up an elaborate and brittle set of rules to do that for them and failed.
1. Buy a domain that looks like a knock-off email provider (to avoid some scrutiny later). Something like emailco.biz, etc.
2. Setup simplelogin for that domain.
3. Go through all your existing accounts and change the email to [service]@emailco.biz.
4. Use that technique to sign up for all future services. If you start getting unwanted email to a simpelogin alias, simply turn it off in the app or browser extension.
5. Click unsubscribe on every email you don't want. The first day it will be a lot, the second day less, the third day even less, etc.
6. Ruthlessly click spam on anything you didn't ask for.
Soon, you'll have it under control.
Then check the subject. Looks spammy, hit trash. This likewise sends the mail to trash.
If it looks like a newsletter or subscription I don't want, I typically don't want updates more than once a month as there's RSS for feeds and email is not your push feed to my eyes, I scroll to the bottom and click unsubscribe. But check the link first. If the link's to a 3rd party domain i.e. not the same as the email comes from I hit spam as there's no way of knowing if it isn't phishing. If it doesn't link to an unsubscribe page but some 'manage my email preferences' page it's in violation of my personal compliance so I hit spam.
If the email doesn't have some form if text below the fold on my not that low resolution screen I'll delete it.
Having done this pruning, which for 100 mails only takes a couple of minutes if that, I go back and deal with what seemed more important on first pass.
That's my way. YMMV.
Get a proton paid mail account and your own domain. Setup a "catchall" address. Now when you subscribe to "something" then use the name of the "something" with your domain name as the email address. Example: to logon to Hacker News use the address hackernews@yourdomaim.com. You do not need to setup an email address the catchall receives your email. If you get spam addressed to hackernews@yourdomain.com you know Hacker News on sold your address. If you don't after a month or so change your hacker news address to your legitimate address. You cannot send from these catchall addresses, but if you truly need to you setup a legitimate email with that particular address and send it then delete it. Proton Mail have excellent spam filtering anyway. There are other providers that do the same.
The biggest problem with "unsubscribe" is that it effectively verifies that email address. You may unsubscribe from one list only to be added to lots of other lists because it is a verified email address.
I found a great way to reduce spam is to have email address that looks like a big company ie google@yourdomain.com or microsoft@yourdomain.com
Your email client needs attention. Make sure you haven't set it to save all incoming addresses and the spam filter to "ignore spam setting for emails in my address book". I am not familiar with google mail but make sure the same sort of thing is not setup for gmail. (...we don't read your emails we just extract anonymous information for market research purposes..so spam is never an affiliate?)
To solve your present problem set aside at least 1 hour a day and setup block lists. You need to ruthlessly organize your contacts lists. The problem will get worse before it gets better. I found unsubscribing just breeds more. It is going to take weeks or months, but the short term pain will be worth it.
By the way I think gmail may have limits on its spam filtering. (...we don't filter out affiliates....really?)
You could get your corporate IT to setup all lists with separate sender addresses to allow filtering, but they will probably hate you for asking...
- have a separate email to sign up to various websites with so I can separate my inboxes. - religiously use email filters to archive or categorize emails based on sender or keyword. - I have a custom script that uses GPT-4 to read new emails, categorize them as important, and summarize the long ones - then it sends me a message. Trying to find ways to further improve this as well.
I used to use a system that decreased the amount of email I read by 100x.
I recently built another system that decreased it to zero.
The last two aren't organization friendly. The Bayesian classifier might be your best bet.