Filtered ham

[azurelunatic]

I get a fuckton of email (by my reckoning). When my parents got the mail when I was a kid, FatherSir would ask "Is it someone who loves me, or loves my money?"

I use Gmail, and Gmail is really good about sorting stuff. Of course, that's not much good unless I tell it what to do.

When I get email from someone who loves my money (that is to say, a company who I've done business with in the past who I might want further contact from), I head for the "Filter messages like these" (from the "More" menu). I try different search options until I get something that looks like it'll get all of the messages of that nature from them.

Once I have that, I ask Gmail to tag all incoming messages with my "Coupons & Sales" label, optionally creating a subtag for that specific company. This way if I'm going to be shopping there, I can easily look and see if there's a current promotion before I check out. It also helps me identify what's likely to not be important when I look at my inbox.

I have a separate-but-related process for high-volume, low-importance notifications. Often I can't just dismiss the entire source, because that might blackhole things like "btw your account is on fire" or "hey, we just shipped your package". When I get those, I create a filter search that identifies that particular form of "noise" from that source (sometimes a source emits more than one kind of noise: I get a lot of email from Dreamwidth that I need to know about, but Dreamwidth's poll votes, birthday notifications, and invite code notifications are need to not clog up my day even though I want to know they're happening). Once I have the search honed, I instruct Gmail to tag all of these messages with the label "Probably dismissible". (If I feel like it, I go back and also have them automatically tagged with a label that tells me what it is, often color-coded.) (Most times when I create a "coupons & sales" search, I then go right back and put that same search in for "probably dismissible".)


A few times a day, especially if mail has stacked up, I search my inbox: "In:inbox label:Probably dismissible" which brings up everything that's been automatically tagged. I select-all for that page and look through to make sure that nothing that I actually need to take action on is in there (like if that birthday notification was for someone I need to buy a present for). I uncheck the ones I need to take action on and archive the rest of the page. Then I un-tag the ones that need action so they won't get swept up the next time I do that search.

I am still behind on my e-mail, but it's not the absolute pit it could be if I wasn't doing this.

Comments

[cleverthylacine]

I do the same, except I also direct companies that I know will be spammy (like Wal-Mart) and that I know will purposely change their email addresses often in order to circumvent people's filters (like the Gap/Old Navy/Banana Republic, where I do in fact shop and who are UTTER DICKS about this) to send email to an old RP email account which I also use for Facebook. That email account has instructions to send email with subjects containing the words "your order", "shipped", and "confirmation" to my main email address; otherwise I only log in when I wants me some coupons.

This also lessens my bad habit of impulse buying because I HAZ COUPONS or IT IS ON SALE. I am about to banish Betsey Johnson to this email address because I really cannot be going in there as often as I do as I can resist her stuff as long as I cannot touch it, but the store is so close to AP.

[azurelunatic]

I tend to do the address-matching on *@mail.example.com rather than alsdkfjasldkfjasd-aldkfa@mail.example.com for this reason. They tend to change domains a little less often.

[cleverthylacine]

The GAP/Old Navy/Banana Republic companies change domains at least twice a year, often every month or three. For a while I held it off with "@*.gap.com" but then they started using vresp.com which switches domains for you and which is fucking evil.

I also do not sign online petitions any more, or when I do, I set up filters to autodelete their shit, because those fuckers change domains once a week. (@email.political.org and @contact.political.org and @delivery.political.org and so on forever anon including vresp.com, and they mail you at least twice a week with something upsetting and a request for 'anything you can spare, but we really need $20'. You know what? I bet your harassment service costs more than $20--RAINN, I'm looking at you, and any ASPCA-type organisation, omg. Human Rights Campaign is also immensely evil this way--I support all the stuff they do but before I give them money I really want to know how many pennies on the dollar go to ads, because I would pay them NOT to email me.)

[sofiaviolet]

I keep as few messages in my inbox as possible, in order to maximize my ability to take appropriate and timely action. Additionally, I've configured Priority Inbox to show me unread, starred, important, and everything else, in that order. I try to keep the contents of each section below 10 messages. Sometimes I even achieve Inbox Zero.

I use a very complex filtering system involving many labels and lots of auto-archiving of incoming messages (plus an All Unread link in my sidebar to pull those up at my leisure). I have configured all of the SmartLabels to skip the inbox, so that I must specifically filter things into the inbox by excluding them from SmartLabels.

Things that are deliberately sent to the inbox:
* email from individuals I regularly communicate with via email
* certain kinds of notifications (Google Calendar and Voice alerts, messages from my hosting provider, Dreamwidth emails)
* email sent to my school email addresses, or from my school
* a few e-commerce things (like ebay, so I see notifications of auctions ending in a timely manner)
* email from coworkers

Because I love labels, I also use filters to label as much of my incoming mail as possible, whether I'm allowing it to be archived or putting it through to the inbox. I also have two filters designed to tag my sent mail as either correspondence or work (I rarely send mail to addresses that aren't covered by one of these filters). I also have a label called *unlabeled, into which I manually file stuff that needs to be assigned a filter. I periodically check this, add stuff to my filters, and then delete the messages I no longer need (and remove *unlabeled from the ones I'm going to keep).