Unimportant Email
I was catching up with a friend I hadn’t talked to in a while (hi, Ethan) and we got on the topic of AI. He asked me if I use AI with my email and I said something to the extent of, ‘Not really, but kinda.’
Email inboxes, much like physical mailboxes at home, are filled with junk. New junk arrives every day. Even the stuff that isn’t junk isn’t fun to open. It’s not personal the way a letter or thank you note is. Those are truly rare. I certainly get more personal emails than I do letters, but I often missed them because I hated wading through the junk.
Claude estimates that 98.7% of my email is garbage. On average I receive 122 emails per day and the last thing I want to waste my time doing is dumpster dive for the 4 emails that I actually should read and/or respond to.
I’ve tried using AI to help me with this problem and only recently did we come up with something that has truly made a difference. The way the vast majority of email services and apps work is they depend on filters or blocklists to filter out unwanted emails. Given that most email is junk, the process of creating filters is tedious and time-consuming. There are some exceptions out there like Hey, but for the most part there aren’t great solutions for utilizing allowlists or screening emails before they arrive in your inbox.
My main personal email account is hosted on Google Workspace. I’ve been using Gmail for decades at this point. Assuming you are familiar with Gmail, you know that All Mail is the unfiltered view of your email and Inbox is the filtered view. Tags are essentially folders. The way I use Gmail is that I go through emails in my Inbox and will skim through the All Mail view. I also have a limited number of broad labels set up for newsletters, paper trail, etc. but I don’t generally look at them unless I’m trying to find something or I feel like reading.
I also have a label, Unimportant, that I apply to everything that isn’t personal or important. I’ve been using this with manual filters for years, but it occurred to me that, with a little help from AI, I could build a script that would automatically create filters simply by applying the Unimportant label to emails. It does this by looking at emails from the last couple of weeks that have the Unimportant label applied but do not have a filter created. If it finds any matches, it creates a filter and I never see anything from that sender again. It works flawlessly. Here’s what my Inbox looks like right now
I now have nearly 1000 filters, most of which were created by the script. It runs every evening from an Intel Mac Mini running Linux and I finally have an inbox without the garbage. And if a little garbage gets in, all I have to do is apply the Unimportant label to keep it from ever showing up again. Give it a try for yourself and let me know what you think.