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> I feel like I’ve tried every email client out there, but is there some solution I haven’t thought of of where I get a friendly GUI but can configure mail filtering in code (i.e something I can keep in git) rather than clicking around?

A couple jobs ago, before I gave up on processing all my mail, I had a perl script that grabbed headers from IMAP (with caching, because Exchange is slooooow), and filtered with code (basically a list of pairs of code refs that took a message => what folder to move the message if the code returned something truthy (or maybe the code returned a folder... not sure anymore). This let me do things that are hard in server side filters like moving things only when it's read.

Not opting into marketing spam (or opting out immediately in the website's settings) takes care of 99% of it for me. On a set of ~250 accounts I will maybe receive one marketing e-mail per month (and they quickly get a complaint to their data protection officer to discourage that happening again).

For transactional stuff a set of rules to automatically read+archive stuff that you need to keep (invoices, receipts, order notifications, etc) but don't necessary need to action.

This leaves you with only the relevant stuff in the inbox and makes it much easier to do "inbox zero". I will typically get less than one email a day actually landing in my inbox using this technique.

> Or some kind of intelligence for identifying, for example, a receipt or confirmation email (which I want indexed) vs a promotional email from the same vendor (which I do not).

Yeah, one thing where even statistical filtering sucks. Usually there's not enough confirmation vs promo samples to train a filter and some senders tend to use the same templates for both.

It can only be done manually.

Sieve is a mail filtering language you can look into.

For Unix there are many tools with filtering as this is an old problem Fdm, procmail, maildrop

Unfortunately despite just being text, email has become a monolithic black box for most which limits what you can do with the text.

> quietly placing new senders into their own ‘message requests’ type bin for me to approve or deny.

New email services like Hey.com or Onmail.com are doing this. It looks like this kind of feature is getting some traction.

1. Mark them all as spam. I never accept newsletters so I will consider every newsletter email as spam. They don't last much in my inbox.

2. Try inbox zero and just archive emails aggressively directly from your phone’s notification without even opening email.

My inbox currently has 10 emails that one day I'll get to and the rest of spam and transactional email is just gone from view within the hour or day.

I wish I could have an "important" and a "transactional" email view, but that's not going to happen without a lot of work, so email search still sucks.

> so email search still sucks

Email is a standard set of protocols and wire formats. So it doesn't make sense to say email search sucks.

If your email client doesn't support satisfactory search, switch clients. Which you can do because it's a standard, not a proprietary app.

> it doesn't make sense to say email search sucks.

Yes it does, because in almost every case it sucks :) The only one where it doesn't is where it's all indexed by Google (the bad option) or where you index it all locally (e.g. with mu). The second is a slightly less bad option but not by much.

> Yes it does, because in almost every case it sucks :)

I mean I get it but fundamentally it's not true. Might seem like a nitpick but it's not. If slack search sucks, that's an absolute statement. It is what it is and there's nothing you can do about other than beg a product manager at slack to make it better but they'll likely ignore you.

With email, an open standard, you can just switch clients. Or bypass clients entirely and handle search separately. There are no limits to what you can do.

Well, I use "the bad option" for search when I need to perform a potentially painful one. Just a depot where every thing gets copied.

I find it, potentially forward something and then carry on.

No, it doesn't. :)

I happen to use an email client with better search and tagging than Gmail.

And it would be? :D

Cleaner, faster, ad-free :D

And... more secure, detecting zero-days Gmail won't :D

Care to share?

It sucks because transactional emails still show up next to important emails. What’s a client that separates this without me manually doing so (via filter or whatever)?

Gmail is good at this when splitting the inbox, but after that it’s all forgotten (unless, once again, you add a manual filter to exclude such emails)

The idea of Blackberry's unified list really resonates with me! And I strongly endorse your two tips, they really help.

About your important/transactional split: shameless self plug but I'm working on a project that's all about a unified list, and one part of that is splitting incoming into important and not important. If you check it out, feedback welcome! garrett@[productname].com

https://www.twobird.com/