[HN Gopher] Using email wrong
___________________________________________________________________
Using email wrong
Author : abahlo
Score : 91 points
Date : 2022-03-06 17:30 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arne.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (arne.me)
| [deleted]
| ChikkaChiChi wrote:
| Why aren't there any email services that provide "Zero Trust"
| email? An email firewall would solve so many problems:
|
| - All email goes directly to a PROCESS folder - Emails you have
| responded to or in your Contacts get processed by Rules/Enter
| Inbox - Allow/Deny context for individual or entire domain -
| Display sender domain prominently - Display TLD in alert before
| following any clicked link - Block link clicking, images, etc.
| from unapproved contacts
|
| Now you are left with seeing only the things you approve of,
| unless you make a willing choice to go and view the Wild West of
| unapproved senders. Once trained, it's easy to see that you don't
| often get unsolicited messages you are interested in.
|
| This should be easy to do, but no provider I've used has made it
| the default. I've had to cobble together my own solutions to make
| this work.
| nojito wrote:
| Because this increases load on tech support for people who
| thought they approved everything but didn't.
| teh_klev wrote:
| Isn't this what Hey (Basecamp folks) does with their "Screener"
| feature?
|
| https://www.hey.com/features/the-screener/
| BeetleB wrote:
| I did this as well:
| http://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2018/Sep/solving-my-email-proble...
|
| I believe hey.com provides this. Some years ago I did find a
| few other obscure providers with this service. Here's another
| one: https://www.spamarrest.com/features/
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| I have a rule in Thunderbird that puts all email that comes
| from senders not in my contacts in a special folder.
| neilv wrote:
| Same here. For simplicity, incoming emails from senders that
| aren't in my addressbook go automatically to the "Junk" IMAP
| folder, together with what the email hoster's spam filter
| moved there.
|
| That rule has a few exclusions. For example, incoming emails
| from a handful of particular universities and companies I
| work with can go to "Inbox" because seeing them ASAP is
| likely important.
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| I've been trying to use the "+" alias whenever I sign up for
| literally anything. At least half of the e-mail validation
| methods out there have no idea that "+" is a valid character.
| Quite annoying. Luckily I use a custom domain and everything at
| that domain forwards to my one user account, so I just use a new
| email name for fields that don't support "+".
|
| Fastmail has a feature to automatically sort mail with a "+" into
| a dedicated folder, so you only need to add filter rules for
| those addresses that don't support the "+" character.
|
| You still can't ignore the filtered folders, though, as sometimes
| you'll receive a notification out of the blue from a service or a
| person that is time-sensitive. So I went back to one giant inbox
| and I now sort mail that _doesn 't_ have a "+" sign into a
| dedicated "Personal" folder. Have a few more filters for jobs,
| receipts, and other emails that will reliably generate mail I
| don't ever need to read.
| k__ wrote:
| I do inbox zero for many years now and almost get an aneurysma
| when I see how some people use their inbox.
|
| I filter emails like the article suggests, just a bit more
| detail.
|
| Newsletter, notification, and work are my main tags.
|
| Then I have some specials like tax office, banks, crypto,
| academia, etc.
|
| Most of it gets archived right when it arrives.
|
| At bussy times, I have like 20 mails in my inbox for 1-2 days,
| but most of the time my inbox is empty or had under 5 mails.
|
| I also treat these mails as tasks. Everything in my inbox needs
| to be tended to, and when it's done I send a reply or archive it.
|
| Works like a charm for over a decade now.
| FabHK wrote:
| Well, my inbox has tens of thousands of emails. Every January
| or so, I put last year's messages into an archive for that
| year. When I look for something, I use the search feature.
|
| Works like a charm for over a decade now. (But I don't get
| aneurysms when other people handle it differently.)
| q-base wrote:
| Another little note is that Fastmail also allows you to mark all
| emails for a specific alias as "read".
|
| I personally have a newsletters@example.com, buys@example.com and
| signups@example.com all automatically marked as read.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Email is just a messaging service. Whatever messaging service you
| use, the core is the same: people send you messages you need to
| act upon. Chat apps are no different from email in this regard,
| they just mask the problem of a non-zero inbox by merging all
| messages from one sender into a single thread. This way,
| important things you'd want to keep unread in email sinks into
| oblivion until you forget about it. (And feel good like you did
| everything you had to)
| combatentropy wrote:
| You just made me realize that email would look better if it
| grouped messages by sender instead of just by subject.
|
| It was a huge step forward for me when I switched from Outlook
| to GMail. Outlook originally did not group emails at all. Each
| message was a line item on its own, sorted by date sent. So
| even individual replies back and forth were scattered across my
| Inbox. Then GMail grouped all replies into a single line item,
| as a "thread" or "conversation", which I could then expand.
| Eventually Outlook followed suit, although at first
| imperfectly. It grouped by Subject instead of the more accurate
| email header, Message-ID. (Actually I believe this technique
| predates GMail, at least in one text-based email reader, Mutt.)
|
| I think email should take this one step further, and group
| messages first of all by sender, then by thread.
| sender (or recipient group for emails with more than one
| recipient, like SMS clients do) |- thread |-
| message
|
| This would help with companies that send you many messages,
| whether it's spam or just receipts and other notices. But it
| would still not be bad for emails from individuals too. Even
| though someone may write you many emails about many different
| things, each with their own Subject, it still makes sense to
| group them. That mimics real life, where a real person's many
| conversations that they have with you are still visually
| grouped into one person, one organic body, in your mind.
|
| Facebook would also be better this way. Collapse posts by
| poster, so that people who post 5 times a day don't take up
| more of your news feed than those who post just once every now
| and then.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I was a heavy email user before Gmail advent, and was always
| using folders in my email clients to do just that. For me it
| turned out that most emails work better the gmail way. I'd
| benefit from a simple option to group all messages from/to a
| specific sender into one thread though
| stevage wrote:
| The problem with adopting a strategy like that is it would take
| months or years to make a meaningful difference, unless you
| actually went back and switched over all the services you've
| subscribed to, to these new accounts.
| rchowe wrote:
| Isn't this kind of email easy to classify (on a large scale)?
| Gmail has a similar inbox system in its web reader.
| makach wrote:
| yes. this article reads like an ad.
| Haegin wrote:
| What for? Hey where the author got the idea from? The author
| doesn't use it. Fastmail? The author's method works with any
| mail service that supports custom domains and email aliases.
| Seems a stretch to call it an ad when it's not clear what
| they're promoting.
| amazing_stories wrote:
| My first impression was also that this was an ad for Hey.
| Maybe that's not what the author intended, but it reads
| that way to me and it's a bad first impression.
| igetspam wrote:
| But a bad one with no case for unique value being made.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, the tabs on my personal Gmail work pretty well in keeping
| down the clutter. Very little that ends up in Promotions needs
| to get looked at and I just delete the whole thing
| periodically. Updates grabs most of the rest.
|
| I actually used to use a separate email address at Yahoo to
| handle all the ecommerce cruft but I find that Google does a
| good enough job of organizing that I don't bother any longer.
|
| It's also not a bad idea to go on an unsubscribe mission every
| now and then.
| sp332 wrote:
| It doesn't work that well. Why ask a computer to guess what I
| want when I could just tell it?
| ghaff wrote:
| I do unsubscribe to things now and then and I find Gmail does
| a pretty job of keeping the large number of notices of sales,
| new products, etc. separated from my main inbox. And although
| I ignore most of this I do find some useful information now
| and then.
| mro_name wrote:
| it's essentially automated filtering by separate email addresses
| for human, papertrail and newsfeed, right?
|
| Resonates quite a lot more than one per sender as I tried for
| some time.
| BeetleB wrote:
| The problem with this approach is that if any service/spambot
| does, somehow, get your personal email, you're stuck with crap.
|
| The better solution is to make a whitelist, and only let that in.
| Then have a convenient means to let people put themselves on your
| whitelist. And an even easier way to kick them off your
| whitelist.
|
| One solution: http://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2018/Sep/solving-my-
| email-proble...
|
| HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18100807
| wrycoder wrote:
| Yes, I use the Fastmail VIP feature for this. I makes a vast
| difference.
|
| I've got tens of thousands of emails in my inbox, even after
| filtering, and, at my age, I simply don't want to spend an hour
| a day pawing over email. I just let it recede into the past. If
| someone pings me about something I "missed", I can always dig
| up their email.
|
| I have no VIP email in my inbox.
| JFKKFJ wrote:
| amelius wrote:
| > Inbox -- This is where all emails sent by humans end up. That's
| it.
|
| How do you filter on this? Do you use a CAPTCHA?
| abahlo wrote:
| No, it's not perfect -- but if something slips through, I'll
| sort it out manually.
| 300bps wrote:
| He has separate email addresses on a custom domain.
|
| He then gives one of those separate emails to humans.
|
| Companies he orders from gets another email address.
|
| Social media companies get another one. Etc.
| tdubhro1 wrote:
| - a while back I tried to apply this principle in my gmail -
| filter everything not from a human out of my inbox using rules
| and filters (filtering anything with the word "unsubscribe"
| works well until someone forwards a thread to you that started
| with an email from a service).
|
| It is a little frustrating though, I'm sure gmail and most
| modern email services could do a very good job on a filter like
| this if they tried.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I use a separate address that I only give to people. Never use
| it for forms or sign-ins, and if anything marketing-related
| makes it there it's instantly spamboxed.
| tonymet wrote:
| Another option is "inbox" , "p0", "p1", "p2 . inbox & p0 you
| check once per hour, p1 once a day and p2 twice a week.
|
| Instead of categories, assign an attention budget.
| not2b wrote:
| Some spammish senders will strip the + because they know people
| use it to segregate their mail into different buckets and they
| don't want this.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| And some clueless bigcorps just choke on email addresses with +
| yosito wrote:
| With many email services, you can set up unlimited aliases for
| your own domain. I do this with Fastmail. No need for the +
| orev wrote:
| Does this really need to be said in 2022? The advent of plus
| addressing was more or less driven because techies were
| already able to make custom addresses for their domain, and
| the + could be a standard thing that non-techies could use
| with their basic email account without needing to reconfigure
| things on the backend, or use a messy catch-all account.
| latexr wrote:
| > Does this really need to be said in 2022?
|
| Something you have known for years may be new to someone
| else. Relevant XCKD: https://xkcd.com/1053/
| greenyoda wrote:
| You don't even need to provide your own domain - Fastmail
| gives you a subdomain for free. For example, if your Fastmail
| address is myname@fastmail.com, then
| any_address@myname.fastmail.com will get to you.
| lahvak wrote:
| Which means their email will go straight into the trash.
| micah94 wrote:
| Anyone have a suggestion for those sites that don't allow + or %
| in the email address? This is always the hangup for me when I try
| to organize like this.
| Saris wrote:
| I use a catchall on my domain, and every site gets its own
| email when I sign up.
| happycrappy wrote:
| Custom domain + cloudflare email forwarding service
|
| E.g.:
|
| * inbox@custom.me -> me+inbox@gmail.com
| bombcar wrote:
| Then you have to setup a more complicated filter on the client
| side based on sender, etc.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| And if you're getting enough mail from an organization to
| matter (and to be annoying in your inbox), then the cost of
| setting up a filter is tiny.
| [deleted]
| g8oz wrote:
| Outlook.com let's you make aliases and you can direct their
| messages into a folder. I.e myshopping123@outlook.com
| 3np wrote:
| You can choose some other character for the same purpose? Like
| .-_!
|
| (Assuming you are using a solution that gives you that level of
| control)
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Another tip is that for your inbox (human sent email), treat it
| as "other people's todo lists". This means you put yourself first
| at work before you get to other people's work. Your strategy may
| vary depending on your organization.
|
| When I changed my perspective on email in this light, I started
| to really see who were the delegators and who were the experts.
| As you might imagine, the delegators don't typically do much and
| the experts are usually doing it all.
|
| You can then strategically ignore email and when experts come
| asking for help, you know it's something impactful. Same applies
| for delegators, but you typically view them as lower priority as
| they usually aren't impactful at all from your perspective.
| samstave wrote:
| In defense as a delegator ;
|
| ---
|
| I have, through my career, managed, directed, employed,
| mentored MANY people that were WAY smarter than I am (Looking
| at you JDB) -- but I had "mortar skills" -- oor as i call them
| "Lego Skills"
|
| I am talented in bringing disparate engineering disciplines
| together.
|
| Ill give you a real world example ;
|
| Brocade.
|
| I was the TPM on the build of their new HQ in San Jose, I was
| responsible for literally the entire go-live of collapsing all
| offices and data-centers down to the new HQ (I have dont this
| with other companies, including ILM, Facebook, Lockheed)
|
| Its kinda my jam....
|
| anyway, there were teams Server, storage, network, app, HR,
| blah blah not to mention the relocation of ~60,000 devices from
| colos in the valley to the new 4-storey DC building made at
| Brocade's HQ campus...
|
| I was brought in because I knew how to gather the data req'd to
| inform an actual migration strategy.
|
| ---
|
| I met with each SME of every discipline, asked them of their
| needs, inputs, workproduct, team, etc...
|
| I did this with each SME for each discipline separately.
|
| I then formed a plan of action, both tactical and hypothetical.
|
| Once I had a plan together, held a meeting and showed the
| cohesive plan, with every teams dependencies and I threw that
| up on the wall and had all the SMEs in a meeting and asked them
|
| _" Tell me what is wrong with this plan. Show me any
| deficiencies that your team may suffer, and what is also needed
| from the other teams to make YOUR team successful. Throw as
| many darts as you can at THE PROBLEM and not the people on the
| other team."_
|
| A flawless move of ~4,000 employees and ~60K devices to a new
| colo with ZERO downtime to regular employees.
|
| ---
|
| So, just know that just because youre not an SME in a deep
| subject, delegators have value. In my case : I was not an
| expert in ANY of their fields, but I knew how to tie a team
| together in a way that was less divisive. Super successful and
| I allowed each SME to air their project issues and requirements
| in private, so as to keep emotions to a min. Esp considering
| prior to my joining the project, they had not been talking
| cross-teams at all.
|
| Delegation is a skill -- you need to know enough about the
| problem (both project and team issues) to be effective, and
| really what it comes down to, is ensuring that your SME stays
| focused on being an SME for [SUBJECT] and remove the Human
| Emotional friction that can happen on teams of really smart
| people.
| atoav wrote:
| Read and flag (Thunderbird: numberkeys 1 to 5).
|
| Only answer directly if it really burns (aka you are
| responsible) or it is answered in a sentence.
|
| All other things come later.
| jrm4 wrote:
| 100% -- This is the only thing from GTD that's stuck with me
| very well; Strongly separate your emails and texts from your
| own "inbox of stuff to do." Filtering one to the other AND NOT
| RESPONDING should be a discrete, extremely conscious, step in
| your flow -- only stopping if it fits the 5 minute rule.
| user_named wrote:
| Outlook has aliases. I sign up for non-important stuff like
| newsletters with an alias, which filters into its own folder.
| kosasbest wrote:
| > I'm using Fastmail with a custom domain and have aliases with
| rules for the different destinations, for example
| papertrail@example.org or newsfeed@example.org
|
| I want to try the custom domain thing eventually, but will have
| to be careful not to let my domain get into the wrong hands. So I
| will be turning on 2FA on my registrar, and stay away from ccTLDs
| that have reputation issues (like .ru for example). Also I will
| ensure the domain keeps getting renewed. The only caveat is if I
| DIE someone can reclaim my domain and get access to all my
| accounts, which is worrying.
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| Maybe you can put in your will to have a lawyer go through and
| delete all your old accounts? Would be useful for a living will
| too; if you're in a coma for 10+ years, the domain would lapse
| then too.
| gumby wrote:
| > The only caveat is if I DIE someone can reclaim my domain and
| get access to all my accounts, which is worrying.
|
| Nobody can hurt you once you are dead.
| timwis wrote:
| I've been doing this for nearly 15 years and haven't died.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| This comment would be extra creepy if you had.
| tephra wrote:
| You might want to lock into using a registry that supports
| "registrar lock" as well. That will protect you from unwanted
| changes and deletions.
| sircastor wrote:
| After hearing horror stories about Google disabling people's
| accounts and them losing everything, I've started to do this. I
| still use gmail as a client, and I haven't moved everything
| over, but I feel more comfortable about it all. The next ate
| (for me) is to start paying for my domain 10 years at a time.
| kelnos wrote:
| I've been doing this for 10 or so years with no problem. I have
| a .org domain, auto renewal is set up, and I've enabled all
| email notifications around domain status with my registrar
| (which, yes, has 2FA enabled).
|
| Hadn't thought about what happens to this setup when I die.
| Probably the simplest thing to do is give someone I trust
| access to the account. Alternatively I wonder if there's a way
| to keep credentials in escrow, which can only be legally
| released to a named beneficiary on death.
| civilized wrote:
| Wait wait slow down.
|
| I can sign up for services with plus signs and use the plus signs
| to do things? Does this work on Gmail? What other services does
| it work on?
|
| Is this a well-known fact???
|
| I've never heard of this. My mind is about to blow here.
|
| I worry that bad actors might strip the plus parts out, but in a
| basically cooperative ecosystem, this seems like a really big
| deal.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| It works on most email services. Some bad actors (including
| large corporations) do strip the plus signs out (or don't
| accept them to begin with) but it's rare for anyone to bother.
|
| I typically use the name of the service after the plus, because
| it gives an added bonus of knowing who is selling my address.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Support for plus addressing mainly depends on the online
| service you're signing up with. Your mail provider almost
| certainly supports it; their business is email. But many
| webservers have idiosyncratic notions about how to validate an
| email address (they could be using any damn library, and their
| business isn't handling email).
|
| Most websites seem to accept plus addressing. But I haven't
| encountered an online banking service, for example, that
| accepts plus addressing.
|
| Incidentally, it doesn't have to be a plus sign; other symbols
| can be used.
| kelnos wrote:
| Yes. Any email service should allow it, as it's standardized
| and very old.
|
| However, some services that you sign up for might reject email
| addresses with + signs in them.
|
| With Gmail, one thing you can do is insert a period anywhere
| you want in your email address. For some reason they decided to
| ignore that character when matching incoming email to an
| account. That behavior isn't standard, but services you sign up
| for should never have a problem with it.
| hk__2 wrote:
| > Yes. Any email service should allow it, as it's
| standardized and very old.
|
| As far as I know it's not standardized at all; it's not in
| the SMTP spec. It's actually annoying that some people assume
| this is standard because they can break functionality, like
| assuming foo+bar@ is the same person as foo+qux@ when it's
| not guaranteed to be.
| stonogo wrote:
| It's not in the SMTP spec because SMTP doesn't need to know
| about it. Your objection is correct but in fact that's the
| desireable behavior -- senders _can 't_ assume that foo+bar
| and foo+qux are the same person. If they _could_ make that
| assumption, subaddressing would be defeated as a useful
| filter signal. As it is, it 's not just plus signs -- qmail
| has been using '-' as the subadress separator for decades.
|
| Subaddressing is standardized in RFC 5233 as a filtering
| signal.
| gweinberg wrote:
| On gmail and fastmail and maybe some other providers, you can
| put a plus sign before the at sign, and the plus and anything
| in between are stripped out so you can effectively have
| infinite email addresses.
|
| Not all providers do this, but it's easy enough to check if
| yours does, just send an email to yourself.
| yosito wrote:
| Note, on gmail you can't filter emails based on the +
| nextos wrote:
| And some services refuse to accept these addresses.
|
| I've found old school approaches such as
| https://www.spamgourmet.com/index.pl to solve this better.
| Haegin wrote:
| I've definitely had filters set up based on this in the
| past. Did they change it in the last few years?
| frankwiles wrote:
| Yes, but not that well known. It's part of the SMTP spec.
| TimWolla wrote:
| It's not part of the SMTP spec. SMTP treats the local part as
| an opaque identifier. It's somewhat common though and RFC
| 5233 extends the sieve filtering language to support it:
| https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5233
| sp332 wrote:
| A more interesting thing with Gmail is that it ignores dots.
| Foo@gmail.com is the same as f.oo or f.o.o! That's less common
| behavior, so it's less common for spammers to strip out.
| schrectacular wrote:
| Yes and yes.
| 3np wrote:
| Yup.
|
| Another tidbit (and this one is gmail-specific): dots are
| insignificant. Mail sent to x.y@gmail.com will arrive at
| xy@gmail.com
| 300bps wrote:
| With over 121,000 unread emails in my "everything" gmail account
| I've come to the same conclusion.
|
| It only becomes a major issue when I want to find an email from a
| real person. It's amazing - every marketing email seems to come
| up on every search I do almost like they're keyword stuffing.
|
| If there's a better way to do it that doesn't involve obsessive
| inbox 0 protocol but what the OP describes is what I've mentally
| decided to do as well.
| ghaff wrote:
| One thing I do is that if something comes in that I think I
| might want to refer to at some point, I'll give it an &archive
| label. (I used to have a more elaborate set of labels but these
| days I mostly just throw most things in one place and rely on
| search for the rest). And then just periodically delete older
| stuff that hasn't been files--especially if it's unread. I
| might take some time to skim things to see if there's anything
| I want to save.
| ouid wrote:
| If you're using gmail, just mark everything that isn't sent by a
| human as spam.
| ghaff wrote:
| So you mark receipts from purchases, travel confirmations, and
| newsletters you signed up for at some point as spam? Honestly,
| if it's from a legit organization, it should be just as easy to
| unsubscribe from any periodic mailing.
| Haegin wrote:
| I'm not the person you replied to but I do use the spam
| button for any unwanted emails I get. If it's a receipt or a
| shipping notification then no worries, thanks for letting me
| know but if you think me signing up for your service or
| buying something from you is me opting in to your email
| marketing then you're mistaken and to the spam box you'll go.
| n42 wrote:
| yes, and on my work email, this also includes. cold emails
| from recruiters and sales people.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's actually far worse on my work email. I attend a lot
| of events (whether virtual or in-person), I download a
| fair number of docs some of which are gated, etc. The
| bottom line is that I get on a lot of email lists. Some
| I'm actually interested in but I also get a lot from
| someone who scanned me at a booth when I stopped to ask a
| question and so forth. The reality is that channels like
| these are where a B2B company gets a lot of their leads.
| sixhobbits wrote:
| I don't have all the aliases but I agree that inbox is for human
| emails and stuff that needs important/urgent action. Everything
| else gets unsubscribed or a custom gmail filter + label.
| timwis wrote:
| But if you sign up for services with papertrail@, what about when
| that service sends you something you need to take action on?
| (Update payment details, etc) Wouldn't you miss it?
| newaccount74 wrote:
| Yeah, that method won't work. Almost every service that I use
| sends all 3 types of emails: paper trail, news, and
| occasionally something important.
|
| My approach is to make custom rules for the most frequent
| emails based on sender and subject (the paper trail type emails
| often have predictable subjects). What's left is between 5 and
| 10 emails a day that I can sort manually.
| nicoburns wrote:
| I typically just unsubscribe from the news.
| timwis wrote:
| I do that too, but it ends up being an evergreen chore to
| setup new rules and every once in a while I give up :/
| jrm4 wrote:
| Interesting. I just find it pretty easy to just never delete and
| use "new." If something's super spammy I'll filter for it, of
| course, but even dividing "papertrail" and "humans" seems like an
| extra step I don't need.*
|
| *note, this requires a speedy client where you can see a good
| number of subject lines and main body at the same time and just
| kind of arrow down quickly; I switch variously between mutt and
| thunderbird. I don't know how people deal with stupid bloated
| behemoths like today's Outlook.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I've been using Thunderbird since early 2000's. I used to run
| my own mailserver; stuff happened, and I decided to switch over
| to my ISPs mail offering (which is the same as what I ran:
| Postfix, Dovecot, Spamassassin, and Squirrelmail/Roundcube if I
| need it).
|
| They also provide a Sieve server. This is important.
|
| If you use built-in Thunderbird filtering, then it only runs
| when mail is delivered to Thunderbird; and unless all your
| clients have the same filtering rules, then things could get
| messy. With Sieve, the filtering occurs on the delivery server;
| so it happens before you start your client.
|
| If you use a webmail service with filtering, that also occurs
| on delivery, and server-side. But Sieve is great if you want to
| run a proper mail client.
|
| The Sieve rules notation is a pain; but you can use Roundcube
| as a Sieve rules editor - it provides a nice interactive form-
| based rules editor, so you don't have to remember the rules
| syntax.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Funny, you're describing things that I've tried to do in the
| past "in theory," but after it all, I've found my own brain-
| filtering (on a big monitor screen) to be sufficient. Namely,
| even if it's like 40-50 emails a day, with maybe 2-3 from
| humans, it's not bad when in Thunderbird I'm not preloading
| html/javascript and I can see all the subject lines. I can
| just arrow down the "news" pretty fast.
| H8crilA wrote:
| The most important concept when it comes to email is _email
| bankruptcy_.
|
| Too many emails? Even in the "from a human, directly to me"
| category? Select all, mark as read, archive. If it's important
| enough it will come back.
| gkop wrote:
| Do we need to batch notify all senders that we are doing this?
|
| How often are we allowed to do this before it becomes rude?
| nunez wrote:
| I know none of y'all asked, but absolutely love my email system.
|
| My inbox is my to-do list. If there is an email there, a follow-
| up action is required. This means that I'm militant about
| archiving any email that doesn't need to be in my inbox. I've
| been doing this for at least ten years.
|
| Since last year, I also use Abine's Blur for creating virtual
| disposable email addresses. (Basically iCloud Hidden Emails
| before it was cool.) these email addresses forward to my actual
| email addresses and can be replied to. Everything that asks for
| emails that could become noisy subscriptions gets a Blur email.
| If the emails get insanely spammy, I delete the email address.
| Spam over.
|
| I also have a few email aliases for things like bills, receipts,
| invoices, etc. Since approx 2.5 years ago, these forward to an
| email that forwards those emails to Expensify. I also have spend
| alerts set up with all of my credit card companies and bank
| accounts, so anything I don't get receipts for also gets sent to
| Expensify. Subsequently, I have a detailed record of all of my
| budgeted and unbudgeted expenses broken up by week.
| ydant wrote:
| That inbox approach is my approach as well. I've tried many
| times to shift to an actual TODO list - with the idea that
| using my inbox as a TODO list means extra overhead - every time
| I open my email I'm having to re-process my TODO list.
|
| But it never works for me. I keep coming back to Inbox having
| three priorities: - unread (must be triaged
| immediately - scanned then archived, starred, or left as normal
| read) - starred - read
|
| Although it's really two, because starred/read don't really
| have much difference in priority for me.
|
| Most of the time I sit at somewhere between 0-5 emails. If I'm
| having difficulties or overwhelmed, that number may grow
| substantially temporarily.
| jbaber wrote:
| Using mutt, I can edit e-mails in my Inbox. I sent one to
| myself with the subject "TODO" that I keep re-editing with
| any todo-list style stuff. It's been sitting in my inbox for
| a few months.
| tpoacher wrote:
| What pisses me off (and prevents me from using my own version of
| the system effectively proposed in the article) is companies that
| send you both actionable _and_ a boatload of spammy emails via
| the same email address.
|
| Github "confirmatory 2fa" is an example. If I could, I'd turn it
| off, but there's no option for that (There's only an option to
| turn it "fully" on. hah!).
|
| I had been redirecting github emails to my preferred folders, but
| then when the 2fa email came up, I had to spend 5 minutes
| tracking it down, because only the inbox sends notifications on
| my phone. So I reluctantly removed the rules, and now it litters
| my inbox by design.
|
| I hate 2fa with a passion.
| gertlex wrote:
| I have the same general opinion around "categories of email
| noise from a company", but I find Github is possibly the best
| one I know of. It's not perfect. Jira is an example of a bad
| one (while also having a high volume of email if you set it up
| for such).
|
| Specifically, for any who haven't noticed, there are several
| additional email addresses in most emails you'll receive if
| you're watching Github Repos, and you can filter on these:
|
| https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/managing-subs...
|
| So I have a series of filters for several of those emails, like
| "If 'mentions' in CC'd put in important folder", plus some
| filters for "If '[reponame]' in title, put in dedicated
| folder". And then all other github emails go to some other
| folder, and never my inbox. (That all said, I may be completely
| misunderstanding you; as I don't think I deal with
| "comfirmatory 2fa emails)
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Same with phone notifications.
|
| You enable notifications from Uber/UberEats/whatever because
| it's useful to get notifications like "the driver is on the
| way", "the driver is here". But then they also send you spam
| notifications.
|
| And at least on iPhone, I don't know of a fast way to toggle
| notifications for a given app. Endless-scrolling the list of
| all apps in the notifications config menu is annoying enough to
| where I never bother.
|
| My carrier (Telcel MX) does this too. They send important
| messages about my subscription on the same channel they spam me
| with offers. They even send me warnings about phishing attacks
| from fake Telcel ads. Well, maybe people wouldn't be so
| susceptible to it if you didn't train them to get used to ad
| spam.
| FabHK wrote:
| > on iPhone, I don't know of a fast way to toggle
| notifications for a given app.
|
| In the notification screen, drag the notification left and
| hit "Options". It'll give you options to mute, turn off, or
| fine-tune the settings.
| pimlottc wrote:
| Next time you get a notification from a sender you want to
| silence, swipe left on the notification, then tap "manage
| notifications". That should take you straight to the
| notification settings for the specific app.
| [deleted]
| ImaCake wrote:
| An Australian bank I used has used their 2FA phone number to
| send me marketing messages about loans. I was absolutely
| furious about it. 2FA numbers should not be used for your
| marketing team's sleazy trash.
| freedomben wrote:
| I think if you set up TOTP the emails will stop.
| mcs_ wrote:
| Disclaimer, 26 years using emails.
|
| What I love about emails is that no ads are pushed into it, one
| of the few places where you can read information without
| Javascript and decide when and if to load external content.
|
| I think innovations should be welcome, but they should have their
| own name and avoid considering a legacy system wrong by default.
|
| Reinvent the wheel is hard,however I hope to see something great
| in the future (gpg for everyone for example).
| nelsondev wrote:
| Did you read the linked article? It's not proposing a new tool,
| just using rules/filtering to categorize into inbox (humans),
| paper trail, news letters.
| brightball wrote:
| That's basically what Hey.com does. Inbox, Newsfeed and
| Receipts.
| neilparikh wrote:
| Yup, the article mentions that the author was inspired by
| Hey.com
| danuker wrote:
| > no ads are pushed into it
|
| Believe it or not, I receive more spam than non-spam email each
| month.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Wanted to downvote, but instead I'll reply by saying,
| obviously parent was speaking of ads in a valid message, not
| spam.
| InGoodFaith wrote:
| Nowadays when signing up for valid services, some don't let
| you opt-out of the marketing emails until much later in the
| flow; the worst offenders ignore your opting out options by
| including a new category of marketing-type emails every
| couple of months that you have to go in and untick.
|
| Wouldn't that be classified as spammy ads from a valid
| message (when done using dark patterns with no one-click
| unsubscribe option)?
| nicoburns wrote:
| I've actually had decent experiences in the last few
| years. The vast majority of services have a clear opt-out
| link, and pretty much everything else has an unsubscribe
| link in the emails that works. I think legit senders are
| terrified of getting spam blacklisted, so they have to
| offer than option.
|
| The only exception I found was the democratic party
| mailing list. No idea how I even ended up on that as I
| don't live in the US, but NEVER give them your real/main
| email address. The spam is relentless and impossible to
| block because they are continually setting up new domain
| names.
| charles_f wrote:
| I've been doing the same for a bit over two years, but using the
| sender's email address and a screening process instrumented with
| some app I wrote (Screenr[1], shameless plug). That gives you
| something similar to the process in Hey.
|
| I don't think I'm using email wrong.
|
| Unrelated: what is controversial about Basecamp?
|
| [1]https://github.com/cfe84/screenr/
| agucova wrote:
| The controversial part may be a reference to Basecamp's last
| year's ban on "societal and political discussions" at work,
| which was apparently motivated by the desire to end internal
| discussions about the company itself [1].
|
| [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406673/basecamp-
| politic...
| rambambram wrote:
| Indeed, what is controversial about Basecamp? Have been reading
| their blog (and now blogs) for over 15 years. I can't speak as
| a customer - or as an employee - but they seem to be one of the
| most humane companies I've come across.
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