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Comment by pudmaidai | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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/

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