I’ve got two domain names set up for work and personal email, but I’m absolutely drowning in unread emails, around 4,000. Most are those annoying notifications like “Your security code is xxx,” “Your parcel has shipped,” and requests to rate my experience.
Right now, I’ve been trying out Inbox Zero with an old Gmail account. It’s cool, but honestly feels a bit overkill and only works with Gmail and Outlook. I switched to my own domains to get away from Google in the first place!
So, I’m on the hunt for an email provider that has solid SPAM filters and can create a priority inbox without all the pesky notification clutter. Bonus points if it supports custom domains.
Any suggestions?
Regardless of which e-mail service you end up using, I find that an incredible simple rule to filter all e-mail with the word “unsubscribe” in it’s body to another folder saves your sanity. It’s still a folder you should go through a few times a week to read all the newsletters and shit you’re subscribed to, and sometimes the occasional false positive, but your inbox will mostly contain e-mail you actually want to read. I have another rule that filters mail from specific senders that I want to read immediately to my Inbox before it hits the unsubscribe rule, but those exceptions are uncommon enough (I only have 7 after years of doing this) to not take much work.
This is a great tip!
Brilliant tip. Thank you
This is brilliant. Thanks!
Do you not sign up for any newsletters?
Yes, those go to the “unsubscribe” folder, so I read them less often than my normal mail.
you can use kill-the-newsletter to receive those via rss
Doesn’t work, in my experience.
You can manually add an exception to the rule for trusted senders.
I’m not self hosting email but my rule is that no email gets to be in the inbox except for VERY rare exceptions
When an email lands in my inbox, I immediately make a rule that labels it correctly and moves it the fuck away from my inbox.
This way I can have notifications on for inbox emails and they’ll either be important or a new sender whose next email will end up labeled and NOT in my inbox
but I’m absolutely drowning in unread emails, around 4,000
WTF are you doing with your e-mail address that you get these amounts of mails. These are more mails than I got in the last decade.
At first maybe try to unsubscribe whatever you subscribed and stop putting your address into random services. Use a temporary mail for stuff like that.
Also mail filters can help with sorting mails from certain senders into folders. Bascially every provider has them and if not programs like Thunderbird have these built in on the client side.
Most are those annoying notifications like “Your security code is xxx,” “Your parcel has shipped,” and requests to rate my experience.
Uhm simply delete them when you e.g. inputted the code or got your parcel? Or change the settings that you no longer get them?
So, I’m on the hunt for an email provider that has solid SPAM filters…
Under your circumstances no provider in the world can do that, because nobody can determine if your “Your security code is xxx” mail is spam or legitimate… YOU have to determike that for yourself.
Don’t unsubscribe, just send to spam. Unsubscribe just confirms you’re a real person and you get put on a list for more spam. Spam folder achieves the same thing without sending any sort of signal back to the sender. Also if enough people flag it, it’ll go in my spam folder automatically. Thank you for your service.
When you’re getting notifications/newsletters from legitimate platforms like e.g. Amazon or GitHub it’s smarter to unsubscribe from these specific mails. Otherwise you will be screwed when some important mail somehow ends up in the spam folder.
Nothing important goes in my email.
Not sure what this sentence means, but feel free to use pigeons instead.
Ah classic IPoAC!
I have no idea, it’s an old email I used for a lot of services before I knew about email aliases like Mozilla relay.
Like I said, most of them are useful once, like a shipping notification or a sign in security code. But most of the time I just copy the code from the desktop notification and leave the email. I don’t know why so many services moved from a password based login to email security codes, it’s annoying that’s for sure.
I’ll try to set up some filters to delete them after a day.
One of these can just be solved with a mailbox rule within the email client itself for what it’s worth. Make a rule that’s based on keywords in the subject line and have them moved into a folder that you clear out every couple of months. Downside is the email client need to be running/opened for it to process them.
Did anyone try CLI clients, like (neo)mutt for that? I expect it can be set up on a server (if we consider self-hosting) and do this job automatically. While all the AI thingy feels like magic, my practical experience shows that there are just some keywords or even just the sender, with which mails can be sorted.
You can do most of that without any fancy AI or machine learning: Since you already have your own domain, setup some mail redirects and filter all mails going into them into subfolders. I have a redirect for onlineshopping where all those order confirmation and delivery informations and unwanted newsletters go. I have another I use for creating accounts - all 2FA etc. are going there. And then I have the main mail for actual communication and another redirect for all those interesting substack newsletters and so on.
That’s a good tip, I already used that for invoices and order updates on my work mail. But I could also do that for my personal mail.
Get a proton mail. The complete plan not only supports custom domains, they also let you create unlimited alias.
This is the best thing ever. Alias work with custom domains too and they basically give you an endless amount of single-use emails allowing you to sign to each service/website with a different email (that will then be forwarded to your inbox).
This not only leaves your real email safe and unexposed, but it also lets you organize your inbox more tidily if your aliases have a structure and you use email rules for them (e.g. you can create aliases for your shipping stuff called [website].shipping@[myalias].com and then make a rule including all the adresses .shipping to a specific folder).
Everyone suggests proton and their whole infra just makes me sus. Just because of how much they are the “go to” alternative.
Maybe I’m paranoid. But I feel like these companies that focus on “privacy” are just not as good as we all assume.
It’s like all the YouTube sponsored segments of “Ingogni”. It just makes me feel like these companies that sell “privacy” are just consolidating data on the people that are worried about their privacy.
This is less a comment about proton I guess. But, incogni, is sus as fuck. Like, really, “give us all your personal info and we’ll “scrub” it from the internet, trust us.”
Are they sharing your emails. Probably not. But I just don’t really trust anything.
Edit: lots of strong responses. Which I appreciate. But, my comment was more “vibes” based on Proton. But I’ll take a stand on these “Ingogni” types services. I think they are sus as fuck.
If you don’t trust anything, then your only option is self-host everything,
Is Proton perfect? Not at all. Are they better than Google? Well… if you trust the external audits (1) and external sources in general (2), then, they probably are.
But if you don’t trust anything, then you probably don’t trust those audits either, so it’s pointless to even mention them.
Ingogni is super suspicious and I don’t believe what they claim to do is even possible. But to me it’s what they claim to do that makes them suspicious, and that’s and entirely different thing than what proton does, and at least proton has documented audits to back up their privacy claims. INB4 the links to articles talking about proton complying with law enforcement requests, every company does that, even respected ones like mullvad. It’s not important that they hand over information they’re legally required to, it’s important that they save as little as possible so they can hand over everything without identifying you.
And also, any privacy conscious service is never better than your own opsec, so if you get caught because your recovery email was your apple ID, that’s on you and not them.
Incogni feels like a product the data brokers created to double tap your data and get paid for doing it.
Guys…it’s Incogni. Like incognito?
Hasnt Proton assisted law enforcement in freezing, locking out or providing access to some person?
I remember that happen.They comply with the law to the extent that they absolutely have to.
I’ve heard of locking/freezing accounts, but the only case where a person got identified (that I’ve heard of) was because the user used their apple ID mail for recovery and got identified that way from the information handed over.
Nvmd.
What I had in memory was false.
The provided IPs but not decrypted mails or access to the inbox.Besides that they also suspended inboxes.
This comment describes Brave browser
Why would they be sus? They’re a Switzerland based company which means really good privacy laws in regards to keeping your data out of the wrong hands. They’re not going to monetize your emails or information, which is a big deal!
Incogni, you’re right, give us your data so we know what to scrub? No thanks lol. Feels like the wrong approach lol
Thanks for the suggestion, I’m trying protonmail now and the aliases are really nice, too bad you have to set them up in Proton pass though, that app is not as good as bitwarden. Only downside so far is that all emails end up in the same inbox, so I have to do some extra sorting and labelling to get things organised.
The discussion got derailed a bit in the privacy aspect. I think Proton mail has pretty good privacy(good enough for me). I don’t think they will get a court order to release my emails any time soon. It’s good to know they offer some protection against mass surveillance and don’t sell your data for marketing.
That’s what I do, but with mailbox.org instead of proton, to name an alternative. They even offer temporary random addresses with the click of a button.
Why make it so difficult when + addressing exists?
Link to random blog for people who don’t like search: https://salmantechblogs.wordpress.com/2025/06/11/what-is-plus-addressing-pros-and-cons-explained/
You can’t disable any of those alias so you will always recieve mails from them, even if they are sent to spam and they still expose your full email address.
Fuck proton
lol at proton fanboys downvoting, you did some scrolling.
People are downvoting you because you’re being an ass, don’t give yourself too much credit
Nah fanboys be fanboys
Echoing the base principle I see in other comments: proactively limit what can land in your inbox. I have a rule in Fastmail that only mail from senders in my contacts gets to inbox. If no rules apply, mail ends up in the firewall folder, which I check periodically.
I’ve been on a big unsubscribe wave for newsletters and notifications that I had previously opted into. If I haven’t been reading them within a week, they get dropped. Next step is to resume use of RSS for the topics I want to periodically check up on instead of crowding my email.
The other base principle is to segregate email addresses for personal correspondence and interactions with companies/services/accounts. I’ve not been good about that out of laziness. That’s more about data privacy and while most of my FnF still use gmail it is moot.
I’m doing trial periods at fastmail, zoho and namecheap (fronting for titan ).
Zoho will fail back to a low volume, web only version if the bill doesn’t get paid while the others just stop working.Those were pretty much the top three I found across all the “top 10” reviews I could find – aside from the ones that obviously cater to spamming (marketing) customers.
Would love to see reasons for/against them.
I’ve been using Zoho for about 6 months and have no complaints. I pay about $12 a year for a couple of gigs of storage - not a huge amount, but enough for personal email as long as you delete stuff fairly regularly.
You can create up to 30 email aliases, which I use a lot. For instance, I have an email address for newsletters, a couple for generic web logins, and then some specific ones for important accounts such as banking.
It’s easy to make filters to sort email as it arrives. This is how I handle the “priority inbox” situation. Any email from my family or other important senders is all put into a single folder, and I have an email app on my phone which checks this folder and notifies me of new mail. All other mail is either moved by other filters e.g. newsletters or just left in the inbox.
This probably won’t help you much, but Apple Mail has this feature regardless of the server.
I switched to Fastmail about 2 years ago and have been happy with it. Does everything I want and it is quick and smooth like it’s name.
i just switched to proton and I’m already annoyed that I can’t create or modify filter rules from the app
also they group conversations in thread even if they are clearly not a thread, like login codes or other notifications.
I have elaborate Procmail rules that sort out the mail. It’s not a very modern solution and the syntax is quite horrible, but it works quite well.
I’m chronically bad at not marking emails as read and suffer the same bloat. For handing emails security codes and shipping notifications,I use Proton mails Sieve filters.
Specifically I make it where these type of emails automatically get deleted after 7-30 days based on subject
