Show HN: Smart email filters to unfuck your email

It's probably safe to assume this is a marketing trick, though.

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...

Sent by unfuck email. Go un-fuck yourself.

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.

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?

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.

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 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.

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."

> 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.

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.

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.

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.