Gmail auto labels
mathieupassenaud.fr
mathieupassenaud.fr
I've recently gone through a bit of a reorganization of my inbox and filters, and as a slight alternative, I found that generally speaking, most providers are pretty good about keeping the "from" address that they send communication from relatively stable. My filters basically look like lists of the form `from:(custserv@clippercard.com OR receipts@messaging.squareup.com OR Sony@email.sonyentertainmentnetwork.com)` and I apply a label like `orders`.
I have most of it still coming to my inbox so that I can vet each one quickly before archiving, but from there they have an appropriate label applied, and it's easy for me to go back and find them again. Some very common emails, like when I get an email from Square as I buy a coffee, I add "skip my inbox" and have it archive automatically.
It may be a little more manual in that occasionally I have to go in and add a new email address to a filter, but so far I've found the required maintenance to be very minimal (order of minutes every few months) and it saves me from having to maintain a `+` address or script.
My observation is a bit different. I noticed that the marketing teams usually put a from address like "frank@service.com", "michael@" or any other first name they use to make it more "personal". This makes my filtering a bit difficult, since I usually want those e-mails to end up in "Newsletter" label, but all others important from this address like "no-reply@service.com" to remain in my inbox.
The slightly better solution is to register a domain that is just for email, and then allow any arbitrary email address to come to your main account, and filter on that. You can even do it in Google. Register an app domain (although I guess those aren't free anymore?) and then just set it to deliver all unknown addresses to the default account (and then forward the default account to your regular gmail while you transition).
I've been doing this for years, and it's a great way to figure out who is selling your email address.
The worst offender was ScotteVest. I signed up for their list in I want to say 2001 or 2002. I can find at least 50 vendors they sold the email address to.
This would probably not be as big of a deal if it happened today. This was in the early 2000s and the tools (at least that I had) didn’t deal with huge volumes nearly as well as I expect Google would. But I still haven’t gone back.
Haven't seen it happen with Google, so either the spammers stopped or more likely Google just blocks it with all the other spam.
I did this as a lot of places don't include a + in their email validation and I was sick of it. I did try a service mailhero.io but for privacy (I know, I know, I'm on Google, what privacy) I wanted a self managed solution.
Now with this script I'm going to change my catchall to a handful of phrases orders_(.)@... confs_(.)@... paywalls_(.)@... newsletters_(.)@... home_(.)@...
That way I can autolabel on the first word and group labels logically instead of a label for every new email address...
Although Google Apps routing still allows more cool things like hidden headers that filters can't search on, but App Script can...
I'm going to have a busy weekend.
http://www.mathieupassenaud.fr/gmail-auto-labels/img/hahahah...
I'd love to take back control of my inbox from the google automatic filters. I rarely check my mail because it ends up taking forever to parse through all of those additional folders and filters.
My work email is all full of auto sorting rules. But my personal gmail lags behind too much.
Had an idea about a year ago to build a machine learning model using Latent Dirichlet Allocation to do topic discovery on email bodies. This would have allowed automatic tagging of emails based on topics learned from historic emails. If anyone is interested in the code let me know and I'll release it. I got sort of far with it, just didn't know how to integrate / build a UI around it.