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Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question: your comment and a bunch of others make me wonder why people seem unable to filter email by sender. That used to be a pretty standard part of having an inbox. Are you using a mail client or service that doesn't have filtering built in? Do you find it difficult to set up a filter rule? Are you unfamiliar with filter rules? Do you use filters but just ideologically object to any unwanted email?

I'm honestly curious.

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It's a chore, and it is a never ending one. I have several thousand senders blocked. However,

1. Some senders intentionally send ads and actually useful notifications from the same address, making filtering more difficult

2. Better yet, some senders constantly shift their address so they are almost unblockable without going to arbitrary keyword blocking

I would like to live in a world where instead of me doing stupid amounts of work to not get a flood of spam.. people just don't spam.

I am lucky - I can literally throw money and tech at this problem. Most people are not lucky. I would much rather spam be elimited as a whole.

The conversations about spam are usually incredibly nebulous, as there's different perceptions and perspectives.

I think what you're picking up on, is that some folks don't differentiate between commercial email filtering services, and personal spam filters.

There's conflation of email 'I don't care about and don't want', bulk UCE, shifty list operators with shifty 40 page terms, etc.

Gmail filters are incapable of marking things as spam. Worse, if something matches a filter rule, it's whitelisted.

Well, that's horrible and explains a lot. Thanks.

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