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Comment by dwedge | Hacker News Reader

> Consider email. I still need to have access to email, and I want to have notifications enabled so I don’t miss something truly important. But 90% of the emails I get aren’t important.

I was at a talk at FOSDEM this year and they were talking about how most emails now (over 90%) are transactional in nature and not personal. Things like password resets, offers, 2fa, shipping confirmations.

This was a lightbulb moment for me - for years I'd been trying to fight email by using sieve to filter away the most annoying senders and subjects but they're right - almost all email doesn't deserve your immediate attention.

I switched my method to whitelist. I created a folder called Transactional and everything goes in there. Then I started whitelisting certain email addresses to let them get to my inbox. I have around 20, and for the first time in years I'm at a point where I could have notifications for my inbox. I still don't, but they'd be useful now

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Agreed. Many years ago I set up a personal email address for that very reason, i.e. one through which I only expect personal 1-to-1 correspondence, and which I only hand out to family & friends, never to companies (which easily get hacked and/or one day decide to reuse your email address for their newsletter).

I have one of those personal correspondence email addresses, but someone got "hacked" and their address list was scraped, and now I get spam to that address.

Gmail has ben doing this for years, automatically. And it works very well. I think a lot of people don't know the feature exists, though

Although it really does, the algorithm is outside your control and scrutiny. An artisanal white list is totally under your control, and fully portable. Break the shackles.

Except gmail pretty unexplicably filtered away stuff like a direct response from my boss, to an email I specifically sent to him half an hour ago. After a couple of these hiccups, plus hours spent trying to locate emails that I knew existed and even knew the right keywords for, I just disabled any and all of their filtering (which is, unsurprisingly, not just a checkbox...) and access gmail exclusively through Thunderbird.

It's inexplicable to me how google, of all companies, can be so consistently shit at search across all their products.

Gmail's magic algorithms are notoriously unreliable. When they work they work, but when they don't, they really don't. And you won't know, because them not working means you won't get any kind of notification they don't work.

I've gotten direct responses sent to my spam. I've gotten emails, WITH ATTACHMENTS, sent to my spam from a known email address. Its a good thing I check my spam. Many (most?) don't.

Seems like most people have just decided that email is for receipts, bills, and spam. And real messages are sent over IM apps where there are no automated messages and everything is worth reading.

This is the main feature I miss from leaving Gmail. 99.9% of email is complete junk not worth ever opening, let alone getting a notification about.

This is probably where I can see the most value from LLMs, the ability to filter all of my emails by urgency without distracting me with notifications from newsletter spam.

This is exactly why I pay for hey.com email. Every new address is screened in and I can turn on notifications for specific addresses or domains. I have notifications on just a tiny handful of addresses and it's perfect for me.

I've gone from ignoring my email for weeks at a time and fighting with spam to quickly checking my email every day now.

If google weren’t such an ass about your data you could download everything and run some queries to see how you should create your rules

What is sending you the most emails? What emails did you actually care about?

Yes yes, you can do this technically speaking, but good luck actually trying - everything is so slow and old emails with attachments will simply not download - they won’t load even in the UI sometimes

For me, I did what you did except with a new email address

That address has notifications and they are reserved pretty much for just people - I don’t use it for websites at all - I only give to people whose email id like to see right away

I have every gmail email I have ever gotten plus attachments downloaded to my Thunderbird client, it is incorrect to say that Google does not let you access that data. They let you do a full sync and use whatever client you want.

I never said they don’t allow it, they even have something called google takeout actually that makes it a bit easier

Yes, one way of doing this is to turn on an email client and let it run on your computer for hours and hours to download everything

The problem is that unless you’ve done that incrementally since the beginning, going back and doing it now is unreliable. The take process above is your best bet and probably the best you can actually do, but outside of that there’s nothing that works well

I’ve even written gscripts with different approaches to do it and it always ends up petering out no matter how careful I am

Also, I think some attachments are permanently corrupted because my apps, whatever the app, always hangs when I try to download them

Anyway, this could be made a lot easier if they actually wanted to let people do that

If anything, it’d be great if they had a tool to do it to begin with - I’ve had my account for over 20 years now so just downloading everything is no small feat

I set up new computers somewhat frequently and have never had any issues downloading the entire 20 year old email-never-deleted mailbox from the server, including attachments.

I will also point out that free email is not something that should be expected to be a scalable storage service.

That’s interesting, maybe I’m doing something wrong

That said, the times I’ve encountered this, when the import doesn’t actually fail and appears successful, I still can’t access the specific attachment I’m looking for

It could be an old picture that is probably gone for good but forever shows loading… in the ui

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