Comment by losteric | Hacker News Reader

Comment by losteric | Hacker News Reader

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The internet solved discoverability but gave us the problem of consciously avoiding information, learning about the right things at the right level and accepting some ignorance in favor of specialized deeper understanding.

Personally, I forward everything from HN's front page, every tech-relevant subreddit, major tech companies and software projects, roughly 30 blogs, Twitter, and blogs/changelogs for every project/service I depend on (for work or side projects)... all straight into my email.

Rules automatically curate emails into prioritized / categorized folders. Setting up those rules was my solution to information overload - reviewing rule relevance is the same as measuring how my attention investment tracks against long-term learning goals.

One process for managing my work, personal life, and interests :)

10 minutes a day is enough to follow every personally relevant development. I do a deeper hour-long review of lower priority content at least once a week, but my email is an effectively infinite backlog of interesting-possibly-relevant information.

> I do a deeper hour-long review of lower priority content at least once a week, but my email is an effectively infinite backlog of interesting-possibly-relevant information.

As a zero-inbox kind of person this is terrifying. It's already enough effort to keep up with the new journal articles every day. I use my morning commute to do that and my evening commute to unwind and read the more interesting stuff.

I don't think you understand, my inbox is almost always at zero :)

This folders and rules was my strategy for balancing the need to be hyper-informed, well-organized, and not-overwhelmed... only uncategorized content shows up in my inbox.

My "High Priority" folder has subfolders for friends, family, bills, and other things that have to be kept at 0. The "Low Low Priority" folder has folders for online store emails that useful a couple times a year for discounts when I need a new shirt or something, auto-deleted after 14 days. In between is everything, nicely triaged and categorized.

It's really more of a personalized private ad/tracker-free mobile and cli-compatible individual media aggregation service - perfectly managing the flow of the internet into my brain :)

So, I'm trying to do what you do, entirely using browser tabs. It concretely doesn't work.

After 200-400 suspended tabs open and a browser chewing molasses, I tend to export all URLs to a list for One Day In The Magical Future™, kill my session and restart.

So yeah, I'm very interested to find out what rule system you use - is this bespoke, or using standard email client features?

Also, what email client do you use? I've been trying to find a medium between "old computer becomes unusable after >10 tabs are open" and "fast, native information-presentation applications (like terminals) are text-only and don't support images" for 15+ years.

I use Gmail's basic HTML mode 99% of the time. It... I can't say I like it. I want something that doesn't use Qt and GTK+, because I perceive more lag with applications that use these toolkits than I did with lightweight WinAPI apps I ran on Win98/Win2K machines with half the hardware capability.

Browser tabs were a different part of the puzzle, for me anyway. This is my preferred way of managing information:

* My email pulls new information into my digital sphere of awareness. * Browser tabs/history manage active context and mid-term working memory. * Bookmarks (poorly) curate resources for long-term information retrieval. * My git-backed repository of notes tracked my own thoughts and plans.

Fastmail, gmail, and my old university Outlook account all support creating rules, however I am not aware of any RFC standards around rules. My adhoc suite of scripts for pushing content to email is entirely custom.

I like Thunderbird, but it's a pig at 300MB memory consumption... however it's open source and does what I expect.

Sieve scripts (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5228) are the standard for email rules; FastMail uses Sieve scripts internally and also allows you to write your own if you desire: https://www.fastmail.com/help/technical/sieve.html.

Oh that is so freaking cool, thanks for sharing!

I would love to read an article on setting up such rules. Any links to posts?

Unfortunately, setting up rules is very client-specific. Fastmail, Gmail, and Outlook all have different UIs.

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