Show HN: Smart email filters to unfuck your email

Using the Honey extension's approach to "unfucking" a broken system, eh?

Great idea. Maybe Mailchimp needs to make their own consumer email service.

I think that might be intended as an example of how to allow a specific newsletter only

Thanks to LLMs, many of the spam messages I receive have synonyms for unsubscribe, instead of the magic word itself. I once talked to a B2B outreach company, and they touted the fact that they basically rewrite all of their emails in minor ways to evade spam filters. They pitched it as "personalization" but in reality it was just spam filter dodging.

This x100. I move it all to a folder called “Unsubscribe” and go through and unsubscribe from everything once in a while.

You can also make it a bit smarter by searching for the header “List-unsubscribe” instead. Less false-positives when someone forwards you an email that contains the word unsubscribe.

By "unsubscribe" you mean "mark as spam", right? Unless you actually manually subscribed to the lists of course.

A few years ago, I did the same and started unsubscribing from newsletters as soon as they arrived. Now I keep only emails in my inbox that require action - everything else I archive or delete.

Despite being terrible, Yahoo mail has a bulk "delete all from sender and block" button that's way more convenient than Gmail. Found out when helping an elderly family member with 200K unread of spam. She's blocked thousands of addresses on her own now.

If you expand “More” in Gmail, there’s a Manage Subscriptions view that shows a list of senders along with unsubscribe buttons.

I unsubscribe a lot every few years tbh but that might work better for scam emails that mention unsubscribe in order to appear legit.

Also a baby GenX and also not thrilled with the name. It could be great, but am I going to use it on my elementary aged child’s devices.

I’ve long thought the casualness of everything is our (GenX collective) fault, however. I see this as an extension of tshirt and jeans to work at an office job. The unforeseen consequence being the elimination of decorum everywhere. It’s not really about vulgarity, but a general lack of respect for others, standards for ourselves, and dissolving social culture. What language is reserved for shock, emphasis anymore?

How often would you even see the name of this thing considering it is a one-time install in your gmail account?

It doesn't actually delete anything. Just filters them out of the main inbox. I find that helps you find what to delete, though.

Fair enough about the name. I am just sick of all the notifications you get from email. Or the dreaded iOS badge that says 1 million unread emails.

Do you mind sharing what service you use?

Mid X here. The name doesn't bother me. If it works that'd be fine. OTOH this doesn't solve a problem I have. I rigorously unsubscribe all promotional emails, and that seems to work fine.

Would only be bothered if they don't append a marketting signature to the bottom of all my emails.

Sent by unfuck email. Go un-fuck yourself.

If you are disciplined and unsubscribe from mailing lists, you will stop getting most of the spam in your inbox. Sure, your spam folder might still be full - but with actual spam.

Honestly, I think it all comes down to discipline. You should immediately unsubscribe if you do not want someone’s newsletter.

But my problem is different: I get a lot of emails that I do want to receive, but I do not need to read them right away - or sometimes never. For example, mortgage monthly statements, which I really only need at tax time.

Regular spam isn't really a problem.

For work email, various salespeople reaching out to sell things, often things completely unrelated to my job title, are highly annoying. I report all of them to spam to Google and block their emails, but the approaches of modern salespeople are increasingly indistinguishable from those of mass spammers (burner domains, "prewarming", multiple scheduled human looking followups, etc.)

Things I do intentionally subscribe to (such as airline offers) tend to switch their send-from address or title or something else every so often and are no longer caught by filters. At some volume, this becomes an occasional annoying toil to deal with. Note, I don't use Gmail, unlike ~90-95% of people in my circles.

Maybe? I've got an email address that's 25 years old, and there's so much spam that I rarely use it; if I don't see an email within about 1 hour of receiving it, it's off the first screen. I still go there periodically and search for messages I'm expecting. But it's not usable as a normal email address anymore because there's so much spam.

I now have another address that I am much more restrained about sharing.

Would you mind posting that somewhere and linking to it here?

On macOS I do something similar for files with Hazel: I have special folders whose contents Hazel deletes at set times after the files were added to the folders. Sort of a system for custom deletion timing, it solves the problem of "I probably won't need this, but I'd like to keep it around for a while in case I do; but I don't want to have to remember to manually delete it later."

Email sending services now offer tips on how to evade the filters that apply those special labels. And if you buy the expensive version, they'll even help you test whether or not your edits were effective at that. So maybe google fucked it up, but I think it's more the result of a concerted effort to bypass it.

I assume the people writing the emails responded by optimizing the content to pass the filter.

I'll add a link to the bottom, but if you click the 'Star' GitHub button, you can see the YAML file.

Marketing is all about choosing your target demographic

Shallow dismissals add nothing to the conversation.

That's also going to match any legit mailing list you manually subscribed to though.