Key Features
I’m considering this, but curious if the name is a turn off for others like it does for me?
As a baby GenX(er), is that a generational thing?
It's more akin to how attitudes regarding professionalism shift generationally--e.g. tattoos.
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?
This is nonsensical. Fundamentally this is a file made to be uploaded to gmail or fastmail named `<provider>Filters.xml`. In what universe would you "use" this on your elementary aged child's devices?
> 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.
I think we'll be okay with dispensing of the "social culture" that is slacks and a polo.
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.
Sent by unfuck email. Go un-fuck yourself.
https://github.com/stevenirby/unfuckemail/blob/master/filter...
It's probably safe to assume this is a marketing trick, though.
It's likely they thought: "What if our existing users/subscribers use these filters? Our own emails will end up archived?! No we can't have that..." and thus they fell into a trap of their own making. Perhaps it's 'lawful evil' to think their own mailing lists are good and everyone else's are bad? Lol.
Then, by a year or so, more and more promotional/commercial emails appeared in my inbox, and nowadays I delete 10/20 of those emails from my inbox daily. I don't understand as it worked flawlessly before. So, what happened here? Google fucked up this functionality or there is more?
Thank you!
I did this 4 years ago on my personal email address and I never had to recover any email.
Then my "uninteresting sender" rules catch most of the remaining SPAM/uninteresting emails. These are accounts like "noreply" that automated emails often come from.
I had to set up a very special rule for a single company because they successfully dodged my other filters but always started with "Because you're a valued Vanguard client, we thought you'd be interested in this information."
More details: https://blog.leftium.com/2023/11/automatic-inbox-cleanup-wit...
I think they need a way to unsubscribe, but doesn't have to be a link. So the circumlocution suffices, or so it seems.
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.
The emails are not deleted; they are labeled and skip the inbox.
https://blog.leftium.com/2023/11/automatic-inbox-cleanup-wit...
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.
I now have another address that I am much more restrained about sharing.
I used to try to manage it with filters and unsubscribing and such, but at some point I realized I go years at a time without receiving emails from a human. My actual usage pattern was that I only looked at it when I expected an email from a machine, in which case it'd either be in the top 5 or so messages, or it'd be the first hit or two for a naive search.
Now I just let it fill up with shit, because who cares? I basically never open it without a specific message in mind, anyway. Trying to manage it was a total waste of my time.
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.
I also have my own Google Apps Script app 'Gmaid' though to keep my inbox useable. It auto deletes / archives mail after X days when its tagged '3-day delete' or '5-day archive' etc. I have filters to apply appropriate tags and remove them if I want to keep something from being tidied. I wonder if I could use these filters to tag stuff that currently gets through?
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."
High-effort spam is quickly becoming the norm and comes from spammers who take the time and expense to warm up their domain, correctly configure their DNS records, use TLS certificates and ports, are careful not to send too many messages to one provider at a time, address and format their emails to make them look like newsletters, and so on. Traditional spam mitigation system are not very effective against these techniques because it was always believed that spammers could never justify the expense of high-effort spam. That may have been true at one point, but it was silly to think it would always be true.
An LLM that can read an email and quickly perform sentiment/classification analysis on the content itself is the only thing that I can see which will fill that gap. (Aside from just choosing to live with it, of course.) I'm just getting into this myself but my understanding is that very small models can do this surprisingly well.
As to why it's not ubiquitous yet, I suspect it's only a matter of time. My Outlook (for work) has been automatically summarizing all of my emails for months now (something I can't opt out of, by the way). Hooking that up to an action that sends spam messages into the Junk Email folder is just a few lines of code on Microsoft's part.
At the very least, I'd think there would be an easy way to put all email from new senders in another folder, since these are almost always junk (and never require urgent review). Or am I the only one getting all this AI slop?
I'm not getting any AI slop spam (or at least none that's made it past Gmail's spam filters), but I really like this idea of segregating email from new senders. That would be very useful.
It's sort of like those authentication systems (which force new senders to do a captcha or whatever before their email will deliver to you), but without the annoyance to senders.
{ "conditions": [ { "lookHow": "exists", "lookHeader": "list-unsubscribe", "lookFor": "exists \"list-unsubscribe\"", "lookIn": "header" } ], ... }
My ruleset looks like this now:
To: (tix|orders)@domain | From: orders@* | Subject contains (pedido|order|sipariş|confirma) -> something I bought, to Orders
To: tix@domain -> to Tickets
To: travel@domain | Subject contains (tickets|billete) -> to Travel
(some specific mailing lists by sender) -> to Reads - those are the newsletters I want to read
From: *@(domains of banks I have) -> to Banks - obviously
From: *@linkedin.com -> to Linkedin; it's noisy but sometimes useful
Header list-unsubscribe exists -> to Ads
That's about it. I don't remember the last time something I didn't want reached my inbox, however I go to the ads and do a mass unsubscription every couple of months.
That aside, I'm wondering how hard it would be to provide these filters in formats for other clients (I'm thinking of Thunderbird in particular). If nothing else, maybe somebody could convert the GMail/FastMail versions.
The main and most useful filter matches emails with the `List-Unsubscribe` or `List-ID` headers.
I looked through the filters in op, and my main concern is that they move emails to Archive rather than some dedicated mailbox, so you'll never see them, and can only find them by digging through emails which you've _actually_ archived.
> Nothing gets deleted - All emails are preserved, just better organized
If they're not being moved into dedicated folders, then it becomes impossible to bulk-delete them when you start bumping into storage limits.
<entry>
<category term="filter"/>
<title>Mail Filter</title>
<id>tag:mail.google.com,2008:filter:2682352652378687976</id>
<updated>2025-08-21T11:26:31Z</updated>
<content/>
<apps:property name="from" value="(yes-reply@randomdailyurls.com OR yes-reply@unfuck.email)"/>
<apps:property name="hasTheWord" value="category:(CATEGORY_PERSONAL)"/>
<apps:property name="shouldAlwaysMarkAsImportant" value="true"/>
<apps:property name="shouldArchive" value="false"/>
<apps:property name="shouldNeverSpam" value="true"/>
</entry>
Also, the "allow all your own emails through", when I've not had to subscribe to your mailing list to get the download, seems a bit suspect to me. The argument of "this let's us contact you if the mail filters are updated" doesn't fly, because you shouldn't have my email address in the first place.
I move all the crap emails to one folder and hit the "unsubscribe button" and lo and behold they all unsubscribe.
I then delete them all
While Gmail's filters are generally pretty good, Gmail's system for organizing and managing those filters is terrible.
Does anyone know of an app or service that solves that problem?
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