Making email usable without extra tooling in 99% of providers

I have finally found a way, where my E-mails doesn’t end up a mess. It’s so simple, you don’t need an extra tool and it works with most e-mail providers out there ¹

1. Create a folder called “Screening”
2. Create a rule to move every E-Mail into “Screening” where the sender is not in your contacts. ²
3. Occasionally look through that screening folder and use “add to contacts” when an email is important enough for you to want in your inbox.

That’s it.

That alone solved a HUGE chunk of all that noise my inbox had. Now my inbox only contains senders I explicitly chose to have in my inbox, while the rest still ends up in a place that I can maintain less frequently.

And “add to contacts” is an action that can be conveniently reached in most e-mail clients I’ve tried with a single interaction. eg.: in fastmail I simply click on the sender’s email and it’s right in the context menu. So overall just two clicks/taps to add to contacts.

I honestly think that method is universally useful and could be a default pattern - or at least a blessed one.

Building on this

What follows isn’t universally usefull, has much less of an impact. Only consider the things below, when you gave the above a shot for at least a while. It adds more overhead than might be useful to you and would then negatively impact the screening method.

Okay? Promise? Moving on.

Contact Groups Before Folders

One of the things I miss from Gmail is how it was able to put emails into clever, useful groups.

You can get there easily 80% of the way, without AI, without creating an unmaintainable ton of rules. Simply by creating contact groups and create rules for those, instead of an individual sender etc.

For example here are some Contact Groups I’d recommend

• Important Service Providers (ISP)
• Notifications
• Deliveries: UPS, Hermes, DHL,
• Newsletters: The newletters I’m actually interested and deliberately subscribed to
• Noise: Not quite spam, but shouldn’t end up in neither screening nor inbox.

And a bunch more, but I think those are the most important. Most will end up in a folder of the same Name.

Why not just folders + rules?

Contact Groups are usually much easier to manage than rules. For most clients “view a contact” has replaced the “add sender to contacts” action. And in that view you can usally also change the groups.

Rules usally live in a completely separate part of the application. There’s often a “Create rule from this email” but no “View all rules for this email”.

And contacts have have a standard. So I could change the group on my iPhone via mail - but the rules don’t sync.

Important Service Providers

All the important service providers. Your banking, electricity, internet provider, gas, land lord and all that. In my case emails from an ISP will get pinned in my inbox.

I have them further separated into ISP/Finance, ISP/Domains+Hosting, ISP/Home and so on. But I’m not yet sure if I find that useful enough to recommend.

Notifications:

All those JIRA, GitHub, and so on notifications Notifications will skip my inbox and land in a special folders.

As a freelancer working I have to work with many different tools and this my solution to unify notifications across them. So there tend to be many of those, and they easily clutter up my inbox.

I usually don’t care about each individual notification, and sometimes when I see 20 emails from the same app, I might open that instead. Really depends on the app. Some send actually useful emails that it suffices to read that. Some even do the threading header properly so that the notifications are bundled up per topic. Others are trying really hard to grow some KPI and provide barely more than “something happened over here!

Deliveries

I’m assuming that’s self-explanatory. UPS, Hermes, DHL, DPD and all those. They also end up in a dedicated folder because I don’t need all my orders end up in my inbox, but sometimes I’m excited and do!

Seeing and managing what will get pinned is as easy as dragging a contact in and out of a groups. Note that a contact can be in multiple groups.

I found that the interface for moving contacts between groups is usually much simpler than