> I unsubscribe to everything I do not absolutely need.
This right here is one of the greatest quality-of-life improvements I ever adopted. Every single email you get, if you don’t absolutely want it, find and click the unsubscribe link in the footer.
(Standard disclaimer, don’t click links in spam. Only do this for senders who got your address through some kind of legitimate purchase or account sign-up.)
Each time you buy something, and they send you that first “hey why not buy something else too?“ message, unsubscribe. It takes a bit of discipline, but it pays dividends.
It is possible to get to a point where you hardly receive any mail. You can get to inbox zero doing this. It’s genuinely refreshing.
Sometimes I catch a glimpse of other people’s inboxes and, my god, I can’t imagine going back to that life.
I do something similar, but: if I buy something and get a "why not buy something else?" email, I don't just unsubscribe; I mark it as spam. I am careful to never opt in to messages like that, so if I am receiving them then they are my address beyond the consent that I provided, so I want Gmail to downrank their trust.
I agree that either of these approaches pays dividends. I feel great about it.
I do this too - if you're sending me unsolicited emails, and you're not specifically a human reaching out for a genuine human relationship free of me paying you, then your email is spam.
It’s a fun button/shortcut to push, but it just helps Google get better at downweighting false reports if it’s not used on the conventional definition of spam.
1) I have a 10% membership discount to the local pet store. They have a weekly newsletter that I really don't care about. I once tried unsubscribe, and their dumb system deleted my account. So now I mark as read + archive their newsletter. It's the cost of cheap pet food.
2) I get some spam emails with recurring themes that my spam filter somehow fails to learn after dozens of manual labellings. So I've made filters to mark those as spam.
3) I set up DKIM for my domain, but I really don't care. So all my DKIM reports end up in a subdirectory I never look at.
4) I forward deductible receipts to receipts@mydomain so that I can send myself emails for later when I do accounting. I don't need to check this inbox regularly, because I'm the only one using it. It's a bit crude, but I have certain accounts in certain stores that won't let me change my email address (who seriously still uses email address as primary key?) so I forward those emails automatically to my receipts@ email.
Other than that, my inbox is for PERSONAL EMAIL. I LOVE when I get letters! They're either genuinely interesting, or they contain an "unsubscribe" link at the bottom. The only newsletters I've enjoyed for more than a few months is Haskell Weekly and This Week in Rust. I don't always read them, but they're sort of my "membership magazines".
re 3: are you talking about DMARC reports? I was under the impression those were opt in by adding rua=mailto:<email address> in the DNS record. If you remove that you should not be getting them.
The only issue (not a small one) so far have been for my pro email when receiving events asking for RSVP through a service… having such a unsubscribe link in it. Always be careful with rules and don’t forget to check folders regularly.
If you send me an unwanted newsletter or marketing-email, you'll receive multiple AI generated fake support tickets from various email addresses, every couple of days.
Most of my emails are either newsletters or marketing related to events I might actually be interested in if I knew about them.
Don’t get all that many widgets marketing emails. The few I do I unsubscribe right away (and if I’m honest, most of my widget buying is through one large company called Amazon).
I don't know how you guys do it. I have extensive filters, but I still get dozens of low priority emails every day. Stuff I should actually deal with but just generally don't care quite enough to on most days.
A step further, which I haven't personally tried but I've been thinking about, is to set up a filter rule that just automatically deletes anything with "unsubscribe" or "manage your preferences" in it. If you're already at a zero inbox and getting very few emails per day, this just isn't necessary, but I'd recommend it for someone who has a dumpster fire of an inbox that's getting hundreds of marketing or automatic notification emails per day.
This right here is one of the greatest quality-of-life improvements I ever adopted. Every single email you get, if you don’t absolutely want it, find and click the unsubscribe link in the footer.
(Standard disclaimer, don’t click links in spam. Only do this for senders who got your address through some kind of legitimate purchase or account sign-up.)
Each time you buy something, and they send you that first “hey why not buy something else too?“ message, unsubscribe. It takes a bit of discipline, but it pays dividends.
It is possible to get to a point where you hardly receive any mail. You can get to inbox zero doing this. It’s genuinely refreshing.
Sometimes I catch a glimpse of other people’s inboxes and, my god, I can’t imagine going back to that life.