alt Hacker NewsDoes 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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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.
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.
> 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/
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.
> 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.
No it doesn’t.
But luckily you’re about 5 email filter rules away from your ideal setup.
it doesn't. I've been using fastmail for years and miss this, a lot.
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.
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.
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.