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Comment by browningstreet | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: I find email to be almost useless now. I get a hundred emails across 3-4 personal accounts and I read almost none of them. I do scan them.. noise is high and signal is low, but not entirely possible to ignore completely.

I wanted to like hey.com for some of their enhanced email management tools but I didn’t like the platform in general.

I can’t believe no one lets me set “keep 30 days of this newsletter but delete the rest”. Setting filter rules per email in Gmail feels silly. With newsletters, value is inversely proportional to receive date.

What I’m getting at is.. best email provider and options for someone who is kinda, but not entirely, done with email..? Most email platforms still treat email as a first class communication platform, but for me, it definitely isn’t.

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I think you're saying that you want mailing lists to be handled as a series, and old editions deleted automatically. And indeed, I've never seen that.

But Fastmail has an "auto purge after x days" feature on folders, which comes pretty close in practice. You just need a rule that routes your mailing lists there. I use their email wildcards with my domain along with a convention of using a specific prefix to my address when signing up to mailing lists.

Combined with OR rules for other individual from: addresses and most of my lists show up in one place and delete after 30 days.

How do you wind up getting that many emails that you don't want? I'm genuinely curious because I get a couple of emails a day, and they're usually ones that I wanted to get. High spam volume and poor filtering from the email provider? Signing up for every newsletter and never unsubscribing?

Lots of travel things, github things, tech things, solopreneur things, seasonal things, banking things, etc.

Almost no human emails.

So...yes?

I know that others deal with emails in different ways. Of all things in communication, email will remain. Zawinski’s Law rightly expressed that, “Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”[1]

Anyways, take time, take it slow, but use Labels, Filters, and Rules. Set them up one at a time, and play around with them. For instance, I’ve set up to label all emails from `@amazon.*` under the label/filter `DELETE ’EM.` During my digital chore, I just go there and `Select All` and delete them. The emails may be relevant at the time, but they go stale after a few days. Another way is to set up, say, newsletters to Skip the Inbox, so you can read them later on the weekends or at the end of the day, etc.

I just updated my article to reflect this. I will continue to edit/update that article as life happens.

https://brajeshwar.com/2024/email/#a-well-maintained-email-l...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski

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