Comment by mike-cardwell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mike-cardwell | Hacker News Reader

Although I'm not on Facebook anymore, I have the same problem with LinkedIn. To deal with it, I just add to my email sieve filter every so often. So far I have:

  ## Linkedin - Trash useless email
  if allof(
    address :is "From" "messages-noreply@linkedin.com",
    anyof(
      header :regex "Subject" "^(Congratulate|Say happy birthday to) .+",
      header :regex "Subject" "^Check out .+ (updated profile|new skill|new photo)",
      header :regex "Subject" ".+ is a?waiting (for )?your response$",
      header :regex "Subject" "^News about .+",
      header :regex "Subject" "ou have [0-9]+ (unread message|new update)",
      header :regex "Subject" "Do you know .+",
      header :regex "Subject" "^.+, you have .+waiting for you on LinkedIn$",
      header :regex "Subject" "see who you already know on LinkedIn$",
      header :regex "Subject" "^.+, more than [0-9,]+ new jobs in .+$",
      header :regex "Subject" "^Connect to your classmates from .+$"
    )
  ){
      addflag  "\\Seen";
      fileinto "Trash";
      stop;
  }

I'm sure you could do something similar for Facebook if you just switched to email notifications and stopped using the mobile apps.

FYI, LinkedIn has somewhat fine-grained email/notification configuration so you can stop these at the source.

Have a look at Me (menu) > Settings & Privacy > Communications (tab) > Email frequency (controls not only overall frequency but frequency per message type, i.e. group message notifications, invitations, job notifications, connection update notifications, etc.).

Also, you can entirely disable classes of notifications you no longer want to receive/see (even when you're viewing the site) by going to the Notifications tab, then clicking the context menu ("...") on a given notification and selecting "Turn off" (stop receiving this type of notification) or "Unfollow" (stop receiving updates from the given source).

> FYI, LinkedIn has somewhat fine-grained email/notification configuration so you can stop these at the source.

Facebook does too, but it's also slimy too. You can't preemptively opt out of specific notifications, but you can unsubscribe to types you've already received via a link in the email. The slimy thing is that some of these are fairly generically named and you can never be sure exactly what you're unsubscribing from sometimes.

I want to receive ONLY event invites and messages notifications from Facebook, but there have been a couple times where those stopped and the only way I was able to get them back was to resubscribe to stuff until I hit the one that suppressed them.

Slight tangent, but any suggestions on how to do this kind of real-time filtering with Gmail? The filter functionality doesn't quite let you do regexes.

GMail filtering isn't very powerful.

Although I run my own mail server, there are other good providers out there which allow you to use sieve based filtering. Fastmail for example:

https://www.fastmail.com/help/technical/sieve.html

Imapfilter [1] would work.

It also uses regexes so it would be easy to convert mike-cardwell's rules.

[1]: https://github.com/lefcha/imapfilter

Oh cool, thanks!

Dumb question: Why not filter by the from address?

That's what the address :is "From" "messages-noreply@linkedin.com", bit does . This is just more specific.

Oh wow, totally missed that. I think it's time for more coffee.

I wanted to be selective about which particular emails from Linkedin would be discarded.

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