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Comment by Slow_Hand | Hacker News Reader

Does it automatically filter my email into tabs for primary, promotions, social, and updates? Cause that is the single most useful feature offered by Gmail that I have yet to find elsewhere.

I'm not talking about manually tagging, setting up, and filtering all incoming email before my inbox can self-organize. I mean automatically. Only show me the true primary items in my inbox from the jump. Everything else can wait.

In the absence of this feature my inbox becomes a torrent of incoming mail that is far harder to manage and prioritize. I keep my inbox at "zero" and I can completely understand why other people give up and let their inbox be overrun. This feature is essential for me.

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One of the handy things that Fastmail (among other providers) lets you do is set up a wildcard email address, so literallyanything@mydomain goes to a specific folder. Any time I want to sign up for some service I don't trust, I'll give them a specific email address. Long-standing practice, blah blah. Also, as my sibling said, "mash that unsubscribe button".

Less practically, it is pretty obnoxious for you to act superior about inbox 0, while pretending not to judge people who "let their inbox be overrun", and at the same time refuse to accept any solution to your inbox that isn't fully automatic. There are lots of options available to you besides leaning entirely on Google's machines of loving grace watching over your inbox.

I think seeing superiority or obnoxiousness in the comment you replied to was a pretty large reading error on your part. The tone was sympathetic to people whose inboxes receive more than they can handle.

The last sentence of your comment sounds quite condescending.

The part of their comment I quoted is not particularly subtle in my opinion. It undercuts the superficially "sympathetic" tone. If they actually intended it to be sympathetic they should be more careful in their phrasing. I'm skeptical.

GP post is correct; you are reading way too far into it. Zero superiority intended.

I'm stating it as a style of how I manage my inbox. It's not some big achievement on my part. It's how I stop from feeling overwhelmed by my inbox. Everyone else can do whatever they want.

It's not like I'm that loyal to Gmail. But I've yet to find an alternative that replaces this functionality that I've become accustomed to. It's why I'm asking so many questions of people in this thread.

>The tone was sympathetic to people whose inboxes receive more than they can handle.

But categorization doesn't reduce volume of received messages and it remains more than they can handle.

I had to turn off that gmail feature, because to enable it you also have to enable the horrible AI stuff. So gmail is less useful to me now than it used to be. You can't have the good features (automatic categorization, reminders of plane flights) without the intrusive son-of-Clippy crap I can't stand.

> Does it automatically filter my email into tabs for primary, promotions, social, and updates?

This is where email MUAs[0] shine. Mail user agents such as Thunderbird[1], KMail[2], Apple Mail[3], and nmh[4] (for hard-core Unix command-line aficionados) support filtering and automatic categorization to varying degrees.

All while being mail service agnostic.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_client

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Thunderbird

2 - https://apps.kde.org/kmail2/

3 - https://support.apple.com/mail

4 - https://www.nongnu.org/nmh/

Thunderbird does not seem to have auto-categorization from what I see, just filtering. Neither does KMail. Unless you’re referring to some addons? For apple mail you have to add it on each client. And a lot of comments are about how to disable it because it categorizes wrong.

I've tried Thunderbird, Kmail, and Apple's client, and maybe I just have too many emails, but these apps completely crumble under my inbox. I don't see any "shine" with these third-party clients. Mimestream, my favorite email client on macOS, "just works" because it uses the Gmail API. It seems like Fastmail made JMAP, but this doesn't seem widely supported.

Are there mail clients that actually support things like priority inbox and categorization that don't simply crumble for large inboxes?

> Are there mail clients that actually support things like priority inbox and categorization that don't simply crumble for large inboxes?

Of the exemplars listed, nmh is by far the most flexible and capable of handling large inboxes. The reason why is that it is a set of command-line executables which can be scripted with whatever language you prefer. So prioritization and/or categorization is a matter of how one wants each to be defined.

I used IMAP via fetchmail[0] with nmh to allow multiple MUAs (on different machines and/or OSs) access/management to the same email accounts with great success. IIRC, for nmh I used lynx to render HTML messages and xview to display image attachments. Other attachments were processed separately but had similar workflows.

0 - https://www.fetchmail.info/fetchmail-man.html

It’s not that making rules isn’t possible, it’s that it’s done automatically, out of the box, correctly by Gmail.

Ahem, https://neomutt.org/

Good call!

I have not used mutt myself, but have heard great things about it and it is definitely worthy of consideration.

Frankly I've tried quite a few clients and haven't found one I can settle for. I used Mailspring for a while because it was close to being a gmail experience, but that went some kind of bad way I don't remember and I don't think is developed anymore.

I want a client that is simple but flexible by default, extensible, themeable would be nice, and for the love of god has key shortcuts for everything THAT CAN BE CHANGED. LOOKING AT YOU, THUNDERBIRD.

Thunderbird is almost usable for me, but the UI is just absolutely abysmal. The kicker is not being able to change key shortcuts, making Thunderbird unusable for me.

Interesting to see people have such strong faith in Google's ability to filter. My experience is email from addresses marked safe ends up in the spam category. Wish you luck.

Ironically my experience with Fastmail was that every email ended up in spam. This included emails from myself, others from my own gmail, and even replies from people I'd emailed first. It was literally sending 100% of emails to spam. The spam filter setting was set to the most basic level, nothing aggressive, so I was forced to disable spam filtering completely. Luckily it was a new email so spam hasn't been an issue but that has slowly been changing.

I still love fastmail though. Top choice. But they do have quirks to work out even this many years in.

I want to second this. Love Fastmail but I'm seeing the same mails that I constantly mark as "not spam" go into spam again and again. Their spam filter needs a lot of work. Otherwise I got a solid workflow (inspired by Hey) set ujp that I haven't modified in years that works for me

(Chief Product Officer at Fastmail here.)

> every email ended up in spam. This included emails from myself, others from my own gmail, and even replies from people I'd emailed first.

It should go without saying, but that's definitely not the common (or expected!) experience. Our support team would be very happy to look into it for you: https://www.fastmail.com/support/

Normally when people see this kind of behaviour, it's because of one of the following: * They've connected an IMAP client that has its own spam filter turned on, and it's actually this moving all the messages to Spam, not Fastmail's spam filter. * They've accidentally mis-trained their personal filter by reporting email they want as spam.

Having said that, of course we can have issues on our end too — that's why we have a real human support team with the power to escalate to the relevant engineers.

Brand new email. Behaviour stopped when I disabled spam filter.

Good point about working with support. I’ll keep this in mind if I get around to re-enabling spam filters and experience the same behaviour.

> Does it automatically filter my email into tabs for primary, promotions, social, and updates? Cause that is the single most useful feature offered by Gmail that I have yet to find elsewhere.

Surprising. I turned that off cause I found that to be yet another google nonsense. It did not filtered well and I simply hit unsubsribe for stuff I dont want.

What's clever about the "promotions" tab being automatic is that it actually makes me want to read them on my own time. Before Gmail my old pattern was classify with read/delete/save. Commercial emails were usually deleted.

This is the one great feature about Gmail I think.

But I haven’t touched Gmail in years, been on fastmail for about 6 years now.

I’ve solved this by using the fastmail-mcp plugin and have a skill that organises all my mails for me and highlights high priority ones. Works great - I run it every few days, takes about 5-10 minutes.

No it doesn’t.

But luckily you’re about 5 email filter rules away from your ideal setup.

I guess everyone is different? That's one thing I hate about Gmail. I use Fastmail and funnel emails to different folders. I treat spam as a fact of life.

Mash that unsubscribe button my dude.

I unsubscribe aggressively. I keep my inbox well maintained, but that's still not the feature I'm talking about.

My work sends me several shipping notifications a day, but they are not priorities. They are emails to be reviewed later in the day. I don't want push notifications for them. I don't want them in my primary inbox. Gmail (without me telling it to) puts them in the "updates" tab.

Same for the promotional emails that come in. They go in "promotions".

If I get a 2FA email or an update on a social website they are sorted in the "social" tab without my having to set anything up.

This is extraordinarily helpful for managing my email, and it is absent in every client I have tried.

Exactly. I do unsubscribe--perhaps not as aggressively as I should--but there's a ton of stuff I may want to be aware of that I don't want polluting my primary mailbox. Sometimes I even shift them to my primary tab but, in general, I'm happy with keeping my primary to stuff that I generally do mostly care about and have a few other categories I care about to varying degrees.

Shouldn't updates go to "social", and 2fa - to inbox?

I don't want to unsubscribe from everything that I might not be interested in at the moment but may want to skim now and then to various degrees. I find gmail is very effective for that sort of thing. I find gmail's tabs pretty useful.

Maybe just me but I’d rather have and triage a single inbox instead of several. “Oh it’s in my social inbox that’s why I didn’t see it for 5 days”.

fwiw, you can easily see the contents of these tabs from your inbox. Each tab shows a preview of their two most recent emails, so you can easily monitor the activity. I check them directly 1-2 times a day with a single click. Things rarely get overlooked.

It's a pretty elegant design, which is why I'm so frustrated that Gmail has been the only service where I have found comparable functionality. I'd like to move away from reliance on Google.

This has been my strategy. I've had location history turned off since they introduced the tabbed inbox because for some reason the only way to turn off the tabs was to never save my location history. Not sure how those features got co-mingled but...One inbox feels much nicer. I don't get a ton of email though.

it doesn't. I've been using fastmail for years and miss this, a lot.

Setting up your own filtering rules seems like a relatively tiny time investment compared to the productivity gains if you have a busy mail account. Other features that Gmail lack are IMO more important than magic filtering, like a proper threaded view, or not being pestered by their AI bullshit.

yes. Fastmail can "automatically" do that, if you configure it to have those rules.

If I configure my rules today and then tomorrow I sign up for a new site do I have to amend my rules to also filter the new site? Because that's too much manual management. It's not a lot for a single site, yes, but x10 new sites a month it is too much. It's death by 1,000 cuts.

I don't ever have to do it with Gmail, and that is a tremendous amount of time saved. It is a lifesaver.

If the email body contains the word unsubscribe, send it to the promotional folder.

One rule to rule them all.

And then my banking updates go into promotions. Along with notifications I set up on streaming sites, and newsletters, and patreon posts. It's not that simple.

Someone creating a more intuitive, graph-based UI for rules would be good, otherwise it’s easy to get lost in the overlapping mess, like you have to run the ‘bank email’ rule run before the ‘promotion’ rule, but after the ‘important’ rule.

Gmail’s auto-sorting is extremely simple to look at, but is out of the user’s control, it’s like a secretary handling your letters instead of a predictable system

I receive promotions from my bank, but only because they bothered to ask my email, other banks spam robocalls.

You can create one thematic alias and give it as your email to 1000 sites that belong to that category, they all will send millions messages to that alias.

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