Managing email: peace of mind and efficiency with filters¶

Goal: less effort and lower maintenance¶

I want my inbox to be much more empty. I don’t need it to be “inbox zero”, but having to press the PageDown key four times is a tad much. And everything is mixed together, so if I start to clean up, I’m constantly having to switch between “determining if some GitHub mail can be deleted” and “reading an interesting long newsletter”.

I get a low-level feeling of anxiety as I’m bound to miss or neglect important emails. And cleaning up the email is time-consuming as I’m constantly reading and ignoring the same email subjects (and not really dealing with them).

So: I don’t want to have my email all mixed up. The inbox should be emptier. And I want to set it up in a way I can easily maintain it.

Solution: automatic filtering + post-holiday cleanup¶

During my holiday, I barely check my email. So the usual pile of email is even higher. The advantage of the big pile: all different kinds of email are visible in the inbox. If you clean/sort/filter/unsubscribe/whatever now, you’ll probably have most different email sources covered.

Solution one: liberally unsubscribe from notifications and mailing lists. I’ve got enough interesting and diverse sources of information of my own, so I really don’t need linkedIn’s summaries (there’s also more AI spam). I signed up for instagram to see one person’s model railway photos, but I don’t need the never-ending emails suggesting other people to follow. Also shop mailinglists where I signed up for to get some €5 discount on an order.

Solution two: multiple inbox folders plus automatic filtering. I want to keep my main inbox for the special or sporadic or important emails. So I created folders named inbox_someting and set up filters/rules to move emails into those folders automatically based on sender or subject. For my work email I have four:

inbox_alerts

Notifications about sites being down or colleagues’ GitHub AI credits being drained.

inbox_calendar

Microsoft calendar notification emails. Microsoft’s email/calendar integration is weird and non-standard and I seem to have to acknowledge meetings on every device I own. My solution now is to acknowledge meetings from this inbox and to use my iphone to actually look at the calendar.

inbox_github

Pull request emails, Dependabot messages, Renovatebot messages, issues being opened.

inbox_teams

Notifications from Microsoft Teams and from Slack.

My personal email has five, at the moment:

inbox_github

Same as for my work email, but then for my personal and open source projects.

inbox_leesvoer

“Leesvoer” is Dutch for “reading fodder”. So all those interesting longer newsletters end up here. “Interesting” means “procrastination”, so not having them directly in my main inbox keeps me from allowing myself to be distracted. And if I have some time, for instance during a bus trip, I can read some of them at leisure.

inbox_updates

Strava monthly summaries. Apple software update notices. Billing emails. Commercial emails that I’m allowing, like a DIY shop that I like to monitor for discounts. A venue I visit two times a year for a concert. Bank/insurance newsletter. Kickstarter/Bandcamp. Weekly postgress newsletter.

inbox_bnls

I’m moderator (and partially sysadmin) for a Dutch model railway forum (which is often abbreviated “bnls”). Moderation requests and personal messages end up here.

inbox_bnlsundeliver

Somehow I’m getting “email cannot be delivered” error messages from the forum now, so I’m stuffing them all in this folder for later cleanup of emailadresses in the forum. That way they don’t clog up my inbox. This is probably a temporary inbox-folder.

Once in a while, I’ll quickly look into inbox_updates. I’ll read some of them. Most can be deleted. In any case, within no-time the folder will be empty. There’s nothing in there I want to keep, normally. That’s not something I could do that quickly when it was mixed with everything else in my single main inbox!

Same with quickly going through (and deleting) the GitHub notifications.

Emails that can be more important are in my main inbox. Or in inbox_alerts or inbox_bnls for instance.

Technical details¶

I’m running our “vanrees.org” email via the German mailbox.org. My work email is sadly Microsoft. I didn’t really want to set up filters in a mail program (on my computer), as I want those filters to run continuously, also when I’m on holiday and my computer is stored away. And when the thing is sleeping in my backpack.

So… for my work email, I set up rules in Microsoft Outlook’s web interface. There are just a few of them, basically just shuffling all GitHub stuff into inbox_github and meeting info in to inbox_calendar.

For my personal email, things are a bit more complex. Sure, the majority are simple rules, but some have “if from this address but with this subject”-like rules. That’s why I landed (after some searching) on imapfilter. I run it on my Linux server via a cronjob. It has a configuration file that I can back up.

Some examples from my config file:

results = account1.INBOX:contain_from('notifications@github.com') +
          account1.INBOX:contain_from('@md.getsentry.com') +
          account1.INBOX:contain_from('noreply@github.com')
results:move_messages(account1.inbox_github)

results = account1.INBOX:contain_to('webmaster@beneluxspoor.net') *
          account1.INBOX:contain_subject('Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender')
results:move_messages(account1.inbox_bnlsundeliver)

And I took the opportunity to filter out some spam messages that somehow managed to slip around the normal spam mechanism:

results = account1.INBOX:contain_from('subaru') +
          account1.INBOX:contain_from('kontaktpush.de')
results:move_messages(account1.Junk)

Conclusion after a few days¶

So… pretty happy at the moment! My main inbox is much cleaner and keeping up to date is easier. Handling the other inbox-folders is also easier as there’s just one category of email in them.

And… as I now have a system, I can expand it. I just looked at my inbox and saw a mail that ought to go into inbox_updates. Adding it, now that I have the system, is just one minute of work. Which will save me many minutes in the years to come!