Email has become nothing more than a constant stream of garbage. I estimate that about 1% of the emails that I receive are ones that I actually want. The rest go to the trash without me even opening them.
I’m interested in hearing how you all may have reclaimed your email from the dumpster fire of electronic marketing.
I have two addresses (one gmail and one iCloud) for myself and my wife and I share a gmail account for things pertaining to both of us.
My goal: I would like 95% of what ends up in my inbox to be something that I actually want to read. Well, actually 100% but 95% will do.
Is it possible to achieve this will existing addresses or should I give up, create a new address somewhere, and then reach out to friends, etc. to tell them I have a new address? I guess there’s no automated way to update various accounts that use email as part of login (bills, etc.).
Years and years ago I setup a system where I created a new email address (Outlook distribution list) for every online registration I do. It’s helped quite a bit with spam. If a company sends me junk and doesn’t respond to an unsubscribe request, I delete the email address/distribution list. It was a minor pain to setup each email address, but I created a PowerShell script to automate the process and now it takes less than a minute.
That said, the other thing I do is aggressively unsubscribe from everything. I’ve found that, at least for the places I’ve signed up, most will honor it, so the number of times I delete an email address is very low these days.
It’s also been really helpful when an email address got out in a hack or something and I start getting phishing attempts (most recent was AMC).
I don’t think you can do that method outside of Outlook/Exchange, but a lot of the more common services these days are supporting + aliases. If you have an email called [email protected], you can send email to [email protected] and it will go to the main email address. So for [email protected], I might use [email protected] for this site. If you start getting spammed on it, you can create a rule to trash anything going to that alias. I’ve started using this method if I need to sign up with an email address and aren’t at my computer.
That said, given that + aliases are becoming more known, if I was a spammer I’d just prune the + alias, but it’s going to be better than using a single email address for everything.
Must admit my bog standard Hotmail seems fine. There was a recent spate of phishing emails that seemed to defeat the filter but that seems to have gone now. Hotmail for personal mail, Gmail for generic stuff. Very little spam. Not much of an answer I know :)
26 years ago (wow), I took a new promotion with the restaurant company I used to work for as a trainer – which was going to mean a LOT of travel. I was already an active email user with an Earthlink account, but Earthlink dialup had not great availability as far as local phone numbers went. So, I signed up for an AOL account, since AOL had dialup access anywhere. I could take my laptop with me and sign in from any motel or hotel out in the sticks, since travel internet and definitely travel broadband weren’t very common.
And then within a year or two when I transitioned into a management position, that AOL address became my “Signing up for stuff” address. And especially that when Gmail came along.
Now I have my personal email on Gmail, that I use for friends, family, and certain trusted institutions (insurance, bank, investment accounts, etc.) I have my “everything else” email that I use for Amazon, signing up for a message board or reddit, streaming services, MMOs, warranties, etc. Finally, I have a work email on our work G-Suite.
Works a charm. AOL has gotten surprisingly decent at being good at filtering spam (and making it easy to permanently send stuff to spam that it misses.) Gmail is great for personal stuff, and gmail/gsuite is great as well.
Same. I unsubscribe or ask Gmail to unsubscribe me from stuff I don’t want. Same for linked in notifications and all that jazz. The Gmail mail filter does the rest.
The vast majority (well over 90%) of what I get in my mailbox is stuff I want to receive.
I’d rather wade through some junk than have to deal with two email addresses. My work email address keeps changing and it’s a nightmare trying to remember which I’ve used on which site.
I used to have a catch all with my email provider where anything to the left of the @myemailadrress would go to the catchall email. That allowed me to use email addresses I created on the fly. I could type macy@myemailladdress and it would send emails from macys it to my catch all email. This let me know which companies sold my email address. iit worked pretty well because I often only needed that email address once. But they took away the catch all functionality.
I haven’t been able to find an app or way to filter junk emails so it does stink.
Personal. I unsubscribe from anything marketing/ mailing list related. I do keep anything important here, though, such as bank/ paypal/ credit cards/ airlines/ amazon. They all produce a bit of spam, but it’s just a smattering.
Subscription/ Gaming. Anything with a subscription that isn’t critically important goes here. This includes all subscriptions, gaming stuff, all non-amazon shopping stuff, etc. I check this one about once a week. Lots of spam.
Work. This one is kept pristine, with absolutely nothing that isn’t work related. The only spam here is linkedin notices/ invites.
I have found gmail to do an excellent job overall of filtering spam/ scams etc. My mom, otoh, is on AOL, and her account gets absolute mountains of spam, attempted scams, etc.
I’ve actually found Gmail to be too restrictive, or at least selectively bad. If I read the preview on my phone and delete an email from a sender enough times Google thinks it’s spam. Which is a problem if the emails are quick informatives that I can get what I need from the preview. Or as an example - I don’t really care what the local minor league baseball team is doing in the winter. But since I’ve deleted a handful of their emails Gmail thinks they’re all spam.
The worst offense was well over a decade ago when the boss from my internship wanted to offer me a full time job. Still don’t know why that ended up in Spam.
My work email is a never-ending deluge of automated messages from Git, Teams, Jira, Azure, Zoom, with no way to turn them off because the automated messages are managed by my organization, or client organizations.
I’ve set up filters so that automated emails from these systems automatically get sent to the trash. If people need something from me, they tell me in slack.
I signed up for Hey email a few years ago. It still checks my Gmail for me. I was good at using Gmail filters, but it’s way easier in Hey to thumb down new senders or put them in one of the sections where they’re auto-marked as read. Plus all the other neat little touches it has.
For better or worse my employer has a Slack-heavy culture so I just make sure most work email autofiles to labels I rarely look at. I mute most of Slack, too. If it’s important I get DMed or I’ll see it in the Jira tab I keep open. This frees up so much time for foruming! I mean, working!
My ancient AOL email does a good job with my email, except for what I assume is a political junk emailer that seems to change its email address every other day.
I used Hey for a year but having several email addresses I had a hard time remembering how Hey works, I do like that you never lose your email address and if you stop using Hey they will forward email to another email address you specify. This really is wonderful about their company.
This. My personal gmail is fine; as a couple of people have mentioned, unsubscribing proactively is the difference between my Inbox Zero and my wife’s five-digit unread number. But my work email is all of the internal automated you stuff mentioned plus an utter cesspool of B2B salespeople who got my email off a list from some conference or another. (Or just saw me on LinkedIn and knows that my large company just does [email protected].) The O365 spam filters (at least with whatever our corp settings are) don’t seem to handle a rotating cast of not-scam-but-spam emails well, maintaining useful rules to kill them all is a pain… if you told me it was all a conspiracy to just get me to work entirely on Teams and never open Outlook again, I might believe you.
You then pay attention to the human one, and ignore the app one. Pretty soon, the app one will be inundated with spam as all the services you’ve signed up to sell it to advertisers, but the human one can stay blissfully spam free, for the most part.
I break this rule for major companies that I trust not to spam me, but this system works for me.
So yeah, I’d keep your old address around to use as the “app” account, but then sign up for a new one to give to your family.
Also, are you interested in doing Inbox Zero? Because I have tips for that too.
I used to do that, but many of the websites I sign up for are important (banks, brokers, etc) and I have to pay attention to that email address. So I can’t just set it as a spam sink and ignore it. Which means rules/filtration/etc come back into play. Nowadays I just use a single personal gmail account for everything personal and rely on google’s pretty awesome spam filtration plus some custom rules.
