Using email wrong

Another tip is that for your inbox (human sent email), treat it as &quot;other people&#x27;s todo lists&quot;. This means you put yourself first at work before you get to other people&#x27;s work. Your strategy may vary depending on your organization.<p>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&#x27;t typically do much and the experts are usually doing it all.<p>You can then strategically ignore email and when experts come asking for help, you know it&#x27;s something impactful. Same applies for delegators, but you typically view them as lower priority as they usually aren&#x27;t impactful at all from your perspective.

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 <i>and</i> a boatload of spammy emails via the same email address.<p>Github &quot;confirmatory 2fa&quot; is an example. If I could, I&#x27;d turn it off, but there&#x27;s no option for that (There&#x27;s only an option to turn it &quot;fully&quot; on. hah!).<p>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.<p>I hate 2fa with a passion.

I know none of y&#x27;all asked, but absolutely love my email system.<p>My inbox is my to-do list. If there is an email there, a follow-up action is required. This means that I&#x27;m militant about archiving any email that doesn&#x27;t need to be in my inbox. I&#x27;ve been doing this for at least ten years.<p>Since last year, I also use Abine&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;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.

Disclaimer, 26 years using emails.<p>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.<p>I think innovations should be welcome, but they should have their own name and avoid considering a legacy system wrong by default.<p>Reinvent the wheel is hard,however I hope to see something great in the future (gpg for everyone for example).

I do inbox zero for many years now and almost get an aneurysma when I see how some people use their inbox.<p>I filter emails like the article suggests, just a bit more detail.<p>Newsletter, notification, and work are my main tags.<p>Then I have some specials like tax office, banks, crypto, academia, etc.<p>Most of it gets archived right when it arrives.<p>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.<p>I also treat these mails as tasks. Everything in my inbox needs to be tended to, and when it&#x27;s done I send a reply or archive it.<p>Works like a charm for over a decade now.

The problem with this approach is that if any service&#x2F;spambot does, somehow, get your personal email, you&#x27;re stuck with crap.<p>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.<p>One solution: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.nawaz.org&#x2F;posts&#x2F;2018&#x2F;Sep&#x2F;solving-my-email-problem&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.nawaz.org&#x2F;posts&#x2F;2018&#x2F;Sep&#x2F;solving-my-email-proble...</a><p>HN discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18100807" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18100807</a>

Why aren&#x27;t there any email services that provide &quot;Zero Trust&quot; email? An email firewall would solve so many problems:<p>- All email goes directly to a PROCESS folder - Emails you have responded to or in your Contacts get processed by Rules&#x2F;Enter Inbox - Allow&#x2F;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<p>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&#x27;s easy to see that you don&#x27;t often get unsolicited messages you are interested in.<p>This should be easy to do, but no provider I&#x27;ve used has made it the default. I&#x27;ve had to cobble together my own solutions to make this work.

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?

My personal anecdote:<p>When I worked at some MSP I forwarded an email to the team lead and walked to his desk to discuss some things about that email.<p>When I asked if he saw the email from me he just showed me his Outlook littered with bazillion messages and my email wasn&#x27;t even on the first page, despite the time I need to walk to his desk was minuscule - we were sitting in the adjacent rooms.<p>After seeing that and the look of despair in his eyes I asked him to allow me to look what exactly was spamming his address so hard. It turned out what the bulk of it was the automated messages from a various monitoring tools and tons and tons of CCed messages, because corporate bureaucracy and the team lead &quot;should be in the loop&quot;, duh.<p>So I took my time to write a proposal to reorganize all that shi^W mess.<p>We had a couple of pretty big clients which we supported and we had a couple of teams in our organization supporting different roles (server&#x2F;hardware, SAN, virtualization, networking etc), so I proposed the creation of a bunch of mailing lists&#x2F;groups (we were using Exchange from the parent company) with an address split by the role and the client abbreviated name (2-3 letters): $role.$client@msp.tld, ie:<p>hw.CL1@msp.tld, san.CL1@msp.tld, monitoring.CL1@msp.tld etc and<p>hw.2CL@msp.tld, san.2CL@msp.tld, monitoring.2CL@msp.tld and so on.<p>Of course it took some time to implement (especially changing the addresses in the various automation tools), but after that and with the help of some pretty basic Outlook rules to sort out the messages to the corresponding folders the usual 1100+ messages per day in the team lead&#x27;s Inbox dropped to less than a 100.

Interesting. I just find it pretty easy to just never delete and use &quot;new.&quot; If something&#x27;s super spammy I&#x27;ll filter for it, of course, but even dividing &quot;papertrail&quot; and &quot;humans&quot; seems like an extra step I don&#x27;t need.*<p>*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&#x27;t know how people deal with stupid bloated behemoths like today&#x27;s Outlook.

Some interesting companies in this space:<p>- Paced Email (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paced.email" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paced.email</a>) - you make special email addresses that will collect all the emails you have, and release them at the specified frequency (e.g. once a week on Friday evenings). I use this to make newsletters not interrupt me throughout the week. I often will do one pass where I just triage all the stuff that shows up in my paced emails, and then actually consume that content&#x2F;respond to it at leisure afterwads. - Mailman (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mailmanhq.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mailmanhq.com&#x2F;</a>) - it withholds all emails except those from &quot;VIPs&quot; to be delivered at specified time slots, by default 3 times a day, so that you don&#x27;t get interrupted by unimportant emails. Additionally, they&#x27;re working on a Paced Email-style product to release emails at intervals.<p>A couple major downsides of Mailman vs Paced Email is that you need to trust Mailman with access to all your emails, and it only works with Gmail; whereas Paced Email is opt-in via special email addresses which you can configure via separate DNS, and isn&#x27;t vendor-specific. But it is more all-inclusive regarding wholly controlling your email cadence.<p>Also, while somewhat expensive, I do find that Superhuman does make it easier&#x2F;faster for me to both sort and burn through emails, which makes coping with the volume of emails much easier. I use filters to sort my emails into separate buckets to get around the issues that other commenters have with company email addresses being overloaded for both important and unimportant use cases.<p>I&#x27;ve come to view handling email as 80% about quickly triaging them - ignore&#x2F;unsubscribe&#x2F;silence anything that isn&#x27;t important, snooze anything you can&#x27;t&#x2F;don&#x27;t want to handle now, then handle everything else efficiently.

Another option is &quot;inbox&quot; , &quot;p0&quot;, &quot;p1&quot;, &quot;p2 . inbox &amp; p0 you check once per hour, p1 once a day and p2 twice a week.<p>Instead of categories, assign an attention budget.

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&#x27;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)

I&#x27;ve been doing the same for a bit over two years, but using the sender&#x27;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.<p>I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;m using email wrong.<p>Unrelated: what is controversial about Basecamp?<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cfe84&#x2F;screenr&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cfe84&#x2F;screenr&#x2F;</a>

With over 121,000 unread emails in my “everything” gmail account I’ve come to the same conclusion.<p>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.<p>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.

Isn’t this kind of email easy to classify (on a large scale)? Gmail has a similar inbox system in its web reader.

The most important concept when it comes to email is <i>email bankruptcy</i>.<p>Too many emails? Even in the &quot;from a human, directly to me&quot; category? Select all, mark as read, archive. If it&#x27;s important enough it will come back.

As a developer I get hundreds of automated notification emails and somewhere in there is an email that was actually typed up by a human. I tried to turn off all those notification emails but people keep adding me to automated lists that I cannot control. I just cannot beat the incoming flow of emails. So I have been ignoring my email for the last year and nobody really complained about it. If something is really important people will contact me by Teams&#x2F;Slack, whatsapp or an old fashioned phone call. The means of contacting me also reflects the priority.

&gt; 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<p>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.

I’ve done the exact same thing, and in addition all email that’s not flagged as Spam goes to a folder called Screener … the workflow for the Screener is to add addresses to Groups (of Contacts) &amp; then I have a small number of rules that file mail. So any email sent to me that’s from an address I’ve already received is getting filed into a Group’s folder. I never would’ve thought that without seeing Hey. I do wish the workflow could be that dragging an email from Inbox or Screener to a Group folder could add addresses to a Group.

I don&#x27;t have all the aliases but I agree that inbox is for human emails and stuff that needs important&#x2F;urgent action. Everything else gets unsubscribed or a custom gmail filter + label.

If you’re a regular user of a free email service, or don’t want to create multiple email addresses on your paid email service like Google Suite, you can always use aliases.<p>If your email is me@mine.com, me+[anythinghere]@mine.com is a valid email address and messages sent to it and will end up in your inbox.<p>I tend to use specific aliases for services that send a lot of notifications (like me+amazon@mine.com) and generic ones (like me+archive@mine.com) for everywhere else (specially tools I am signing up for to try out, and I hate drip email campaigns they trigger)<p>You can then set up rules on your email service provider to automatically route emails to a sub folder, spam or archive based on the to address.<p>I use G Suite — I mark all emails from Amazon as read automatically (I still want to be able to search for them if needed), move most email to spam automatically, and move newsletters I really want to read to the inbox instead of updates and star them.<p>Oh, and you can also automatically respond with “unsubscribe” to stop receiving emails from services. Most marketing email services support this.

I&#x27;ve been trying to use the &quot;+&quot; alias whenever I sign up for literally anything. At least half of the e-mail validation methods out there have no idea that &quot;+&quot; 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&#x27;t support &quot;+&quot;.<p>Fastmail has a feature to automatically sort mail with a &quot;+&quot; into a dedicated folder, so you only need to add filter rules for those addresses that don&#x27;t support the &quot;+&quot; character.<p>You still can&#x27;t ignore the filtered folders, though, as sometimes you&#x27;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 <i>doesn&#x27;t</i> have a &quot;+&quot; sign into a dedicated &quot;Personal&quot; folder. Have a few more filters for jobs, receipts, and other emails that will reliably generate mail I don&#x27;t ever need to read.

Nice. I have been following something similar but even more straightforward.<p>INBOX - Everything that I&#x27;m OK with, else they are either unsubscribed or blacklisted at my @oinam.com (humans and non-humans).<p>I have my primary email (since 2005), work emails, and a few other project emails all on the same Apple Mail Client[1]. I also look at just two panes -- the mail list and the message window -- no toolbox, no nothing. Took some time but have learned all the possible keyboard shortcuts.<p>I follow the -- reply if I can do it quickly and within a few minutes, else flagged for scheduled email-time.<p>Newsletters that I want to subscribe to; are subscribed with the known formula of brajeshwar+source@gmail.com. I use Gmail just for newsletters and beta sign-ups, waitlists, etc.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.oinam.com&#x2F;img&#x2F;oinam&#x2F;brajeshwar-apple-macos-mail-2020.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.oinam.com&#x2F;img&#x2F;oinam&#x2F;brajeshwar-apple-macos-mail-...</a>

Wait wait slow down.<p>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?<p>Is this a well-known fact???<p>I&#x27;ve never heard of this. My mind is about to blow here.<p>I worry that bad actors might strip the plus parts out, but in a basically cooperative ecosystem, this seems like a really big deal.

I wont list my email tips, because they will cause your bank to flag up your online purchases as fraudulent when they are not, thus generating a shed load of extra phone calls and other activities in order to shop online.<p>But its a great way to check out what banks and card processors use as metrics and what they data share, and you can find out when someone gets hacked or ignored marketing preferences to stay off mailing list. Oh and spam becomes a thing of the past without needing any 3rd party anti spam provider.<p>Think out of the box.

I just use completely different email accounts for different purposes. This also makes it easier to receive email notifications at a different rate and on different time schedules. So, notifications for some emails are displayed quickly, some once a day, some never (manual refresh only)...<p>Can you do this with aliases on the same email account? I guess it&#x27;s possible, but less likely to be supported by a typical email client.

Some spammish senders will strip the + because they know people use it to segregate their mail into different buckets and they don&#x27;t want this.

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&#x27;ve subscribed to, to these new accounts.

Another little note is that Fastmail also allows you to mark all emails for a specific alias as &quot;read&quot;.<p>I personally have a newsletters@example.com, buys@example.com and signups@example.com all automatically marked as read.

Funny story about using the alias as suggested, I have a couple of websites I can&#x27;t unsubscribe because they can&#x27;t process the character &quot;+&quot; on their forms.

it&#x27;s essentially automated filtering by separate email addresses for human, papertrail and newsfeed, right?<p>Resonates quite a lot more than one per sender as I tried for some time.

Anyone have a suggestion for those sites that don&#x27;t allow + or % in the email address? This is always the hangup for me when I try to organize like this.

Outlook has aliases. I sign up for non-important stuff like newsletters with an alias, which filters into its own folder.

If you haven’t tried Hey from Basecamp it truly is a wonderful service and I can’t recommend it enough.

&gt; Inbox — This is where all emails sent by humans end up. That’s it.<p>How do you filter on this? Do you use a CAPTCHA?

I&#x27;m a happy Hey user. It made my e-mails manageable again. It&#x27;s so good!

If you&#x27;re using gmail, just mark everything that isn&#x27;t sent by a human as spam.