The Email Filter That Saved My Inbox
I promised myself I’d never write life-hackish articles on here, but this trick I came up with by myself. A stroke of genius that most likely many before me have figured out already. I just implemented this filter and it has worked wonders on my Gmail account, filtering out all the unecessary mail with a very low amount of false positives. Here are the steps:
- Find all email with the word “unsubscribe” in the text
- Archive it, label it, and read it later
I’ve found that with marketing emails, it’s generally required that you have a way to opt-out of the service. The magic word here is “unsubscribe,” invariably used by mailers. This is the word that you don’t normally see in high value emails either.
So try it out, run a test search, and see how many false positives you get. I didn’t find any for 6 months back.
As said before, I believe that cute little tips like these generally take up more time implementing than time saved, but this one helped me out.