Show HN: Smart email filters to unfuck your email

It's nothing to do about having that word show up in my email, and instead whether my opinion on professionalism and my perception on how professionalism may impact the quality of the product is out of touch.

It's more akin to how attitudes regarding professionalism shift generationally--e.g. tattoos.

kilroy1232• 11 months ago

It doesn't actually delete anything. Just filters them out of the main inbox. I find that helps you find what to delete, though.

Fair enough about the name. I am just sick of all the notifications you get from email. Or the dreaded iOS badge that says 1 million unread emails.

ocrow• 11 months ago

Mid X here. The name doesn't bother me. If it works that'd be fine. OTOH this doesn't solve a problem I have. I rigorously unsubscribe all promotional emails, and that seems to work fine.

jonhohle2• 11 months ago

Also a baby GenX and also not thrilled with the name. It could be great, but am I going to use it on my elementary aged child’s devices.

I’ve long thought the casualness of everything is our (GenX collective) fault, however. I see this as an extension of tshirt and jeans to work at an office job. The unforeseen consequence being the elimination of decorum everywhere. It’s not really about vulgarity, but a general lack of respect for others, standards for ourselves, and dissolving social culture. What language is reserved for shock, emphasis anymore?

baseballdork• 11 months ago

It could be great, but am I going to use it on my elementary aged child’s devices.

This is nonsensical. Fundamentally this is a file made to be uploaded to gmail or fastmail named `<provider>Filters.xml`. In what universe would you "use" this on your elementary aged child's devices?

I see this as an extension of tshirt and jeans to work at an office job. The unforeseen consequence being the elimination of decorum everywhere. It’s not really about vulgarity, but a general lack of respect for others, standards for ourselves, and dissolving social culture.

I think we'll be okay with dispensing of the "social culture" that is slacks and a polo.

OJFord• 11 months ago

(Millennial) it doesn't particularly faze me, for a while I used/tried out the cli tool 'thefuck' at work for example, but certainly I agree in the sense that I wouldn't choose such a name for my own thing, and it does surprise me a bit that people do. It's attention-grabbing though, I suppose.

scifi• 11 months ago

Neat. The potty mouth adds nothing.

hiatus4• 11 months ago

Shallow dismissals add nothing to the conversation.

apparent9• 11 months ago

I actually agree with GP. For example, I often show stuff I find on HN with my kid. Even if this one were interesting to me, or I decided to try it, I wouldn't show it to her because of the name.

jazzyjackson• 11 months ago

Marketing is all about choosing your target demographic

yabones• 11 months ago

So everybody else's newsletters go to trash except theirs?

https://github.com/stevenirby/unfuckemail/blob/master/filter...

0x3f3• 11 months ago

Great idea. Maybe Mailchimp needs to make their own consumer email service.

DetroitThrow2• 11 months ago

Using the Honey extension's approach to "unfucking" a broken system, eh?

pxeger1• 11 months ago

I think that might be intended as an example of how to allow a specific newsletter only

account424• 11 months ago

Then it should use example.com and not their own newsletter. This is pretty shady.

jeroenhd• 11 months ago

For what it's worth, I can think of a non-evil reason to do this (i.e. telling people "there was a bug in our mail filters and we're accidentally throwing away important emails, update immediately").

It's probably safe to assume this is a marketing trick, though.

DetroitThrow2• 11 months ago

Well we can rule out the former given that randomdailyurls is included in the "Mark as nonspam AND important" list..

BitsAndObjects2• 11 months ago

They don't require your email address to download the filters, so how exactly do they get your address in order to deliver this non-evil allow-listed notification email?

It's likely they thought: "What if our existing users/subscribers use these filters? Our own emails will end up archived?! No we can't have that..." and thus they fell into a trap of their own making. Perhaps it's 'lawful evil' to think their own mailing lists are good and everyone else's are bad? Lol.

achairapart2• 11 months ago

Maybe someone can explain this to me: Since forever Gmail auto-organized my newsletter/commercial emails with the `Notification`/`Promotional` labels, skipping the inbox, without special filters like this one.

Then, by a year or so, more and more promotional/commercial emails appeared in my inbox, and nowadays I delete 10/20 of those emails from my inbox daily. I don't understand as it worked flawlessly before. So, what happened here? Google fucked up this functionality or there is more?

Thank you!

0x3f3• 11 months ago

I assume the people writing the emails responded by optimizing the content to pass the filter.

achairapart2• 11 months ago

That's a possibility. The thing is, I can't see a pattern. Even from the same provider, some mails are hitting my inbox, others are correctly filtered. It looks totally random and it's quite frustrating.

tomaskafka• 11 months ago

Or whatever team have done this at Google is no longer incentivized to continue the work and it just slowly falls apart

hoistbypetard2• 11 months ago

Email sending services now offer tips on how to evade the filters that apply those special labels. And if you buy the expensive version, they'll even help you test whether or not your edits were effective at that. So maybe google fucked it up, but I think it's more the result of a concerted effort to bypass it.

0x3f3• 11 months ago

Is this different from what e.g. Apple's Mail client already does with categories? Letting something read all my email is a big frictionful ask, so I tend to only do it for very-well-established entities.

edweis• 11 months ago

Easy way to do this: search for the word "unsubscribe" in your email and delete all of them.

I did this 4 years ago on my personal email address and I never had to recover any email.

apparent9• 11 months ago

Thanks to LLMs, many of the spam messages I receive have synonyms for unsubscribe, instead of the magic word itself. I once talked to a B2B outreach company, and they touted the fact that they basically rewrite all of their emails in minor ways to evade spam filters. They pitched it as "personalization" but in reality it was just spam filter dodging.

Leftium2• 11 months ago

I would say the "unsubscribe" rule still catches about 80-90% of the SPAM for me. (I thought the US had a law that any promotional email must include a link with "unsubscribe")

Then my "uninteresting sender" rules catch most of the remaining SPAM/uninteresting emails. These are accounts like "noreply" that automated emails often come from.

I had to set up a very special rule for a single company because they successfully dodged my other filters but always started with "Because you're a valued Vanguard client, we thought you'd be interested in this information."

More details: https://blog.leftium.com/2023/11/automatic-inbox-cleanup-wit...

cowlby• 11 months ago

This x100. I move it all to a folder called “Unsubscribe” and go through and unsubscribe from everything once in a while.

You can also make it a bit smarter by searching for the header “List-unsubscribe” instead. Less false-positives when someone forwards you an email that contains the word unsubscribe.

bityard2• 11 months ago

You have to be a little careful about this. That works for semi-ethical marketing departments, but for actual spammers it can send a signal that there's a warm body behind the email address, making it far more valuable and more likely to receive even more spam in the future.

zlies• 11 months ago

A few years ago, I did the same and started unsubscribing from newsletters as soon as they arrived. Now I keep only emails in my inbox that require action - everything else I archive or delete.

giancarlostoro• 11 months ago

I unsubscribe a lot every few years tbh but that might work better for scam emails that mention unsubscribe in order to appear legit.

frollogaston• 11 months ago

Despite being terrible, Yahoo mail has a bulk "delete all from sender and block" button that's way more convenient than Gmail. Found out when helping an elderly family member with 200K unread of spam. She's blocked thousands of addresses on her own now.

wrs• 11 months ago

If you expand “More” in Gmail, there’s a Manage Subscriptions view that shows a list of senders along with unsubscribe buttons.

account424• 11 months ago

By "unsubscribe" you mean "mark as spam", right? Unless you actually manually subscribed to the lists of course.

Leftium2• 11 months ago

I made a filter so the "unsubscribe" emails never reach my inbox (and thus never trigger a new mail notification)

The emails are not deleted; they are labeled and skip the inbox.

https://blog.leftium.com/2023/11/automatic-inbox-cleanup-wit...

bobosha• 11 months ago

Nice work! will give it a try...

evolarjun• 11 months ago

The page says "open source", but I don't see links to the source anywhere so I can see what filters installing this would add. I'm sure it's fine, but I wouldn't add a set of email filters without knowing what they were first.

kilroy1232• 11 months ago

I'll add a link to the bottom, but if you click the 'Star' GitHub button, you can see the YAML file.

WesolyKubeczek• 11 months ago

Wait excuse me but what in the name of ever-loving fuck

    <entry>
      <category term="filter"/>
      <title>Mail Filter</title>
      <id>tag:mail.google.com,2008:filter:2682352652378687976</id>
      <updated>2025-08-21T11:26:31Z</updated>
      <content/>
      <apps:property name="from" value="(yes-reply@randomdailyurls.com OR yes-reply@unfuck.email)"/>
      <apps:property name="hasTheWord" value="category:(CATEGORY_PERSONAL)"/>
      <apps:property name="shouldAlwaysMarkAsImportant" value="true"/>
      <apps:property name="shouldArchive" value="false"/>
      <apps:property name="shouldNeverSpam" value="true"/>
    </entry>

I think I'll skip this.

_9ptr• 11 months ago

Do americans really get that much spam? I don't see the point of this. You can unsubscribe most superfluous newsletters anyway and you have a spam filter. A few intelligently chosen folders and inbox zero is a piece of cake.

torton3• 11 months ago

Regular spam isn't really a problem.

For work email, various salespeople reaching out to sell things, often things completely unrelated to my job title, are highly annoying. I report all of them to spam to Google and block their emails, but the approaches of modern salespeople are increasingly indistinguishable from those of mass spammers (burner domains, "prewarming", multiple scheduled human looking followups, etc.)

Things I do intentionally subscribe to (such as airline offers) tend to switch their send-from address or title or something else every so often and are no longer caught by filters. At some volume, this becomes an occasional annoying toil to deal with. Note, I don't use Gmail, unlike ~90-95% of people in my circles.

account424• 11 months ago

Is this coming from companies in the US? More effective might be to send their legal department a friendly reminder of the CAN-SPAM act.

apparent9• 11 months ago

I can't understand why follow-ups to emails I have marked as spam in my Mac's Mail application end up in my inbox. It seems that if I go to the gmail interface and mark as spam there, this doesn't happen. But why doesn't gmail get the hint when Mac Mail moves a message from inbox to spam?

hoistbypetard2• 11 months ago

Maybe? I've got an email address that's 25 years old, and there's so much spam that I rarely use it; if I don't see an email within about 1 hour of receiving it, it's off the first screen. I still go there periodically and search for messages I'm expecting. But it's not usable as a normal email address anymore because there's so much spam.

I now have another address that I am much more restrained about sharing.

tlogan• 11 months ago

If you are disciplined and unsubscribe from mailing lists, you will stop getting most of the spam in your inbox. Sure, your spam folder might still be full - but with actual spam.

Honestly, I think it all comes down to discipline. You should immediately unsubscribe if you do not want someone’s newsletter.

But my problem is different: I get a lot of emails that I do want to receive, but I do not need to read them right away - or sometimes never. For example, mortgage monthly statements, which I really only need at tax time.

slipperydippery• 11 months ago

Dozens of junk emails per day. I don't think it has anything to do with being American.

I used to try to manage it with filters and unsubscribing and such, but at some point I realized I go years at a time without receiving emails from a human. My actual usage pattern was that I only looked at it when I expected an email from a machine, in which case it'd either be in the top 5 or so messages, or it'd be the first hit or two for a naive search.

Now I just let it fill up with shit, because who cares? I basically never open it without a specific message in mind, anyway. Trying to manage it was a total waste of my time.

hennell• 11 months ago

Doesn't gmail split email by promotions/social/updates by default now? I've had that for a long while and it keeps most important stuff in the inbox while hiding the mess.

I also have my own Google Apps Script app 'Gmaid' though to keep my inbox useable. It auto deletes / archives mail after X days when its tagged '3-day delete' or '5-day archive' etc. I have filters to apply appropriate tags and remove them if I want to keep something from being tidied. I wonder if I could use these filters to tag stuff that currently gets through?

treetalker2• 11 months ago

Would you mind posting that somewhere and linking to it here?

On macOS I do something similar for files with Hazel: I have special folders whose contents Hazel deletes at set times after the files were added to the folders. Sort of a system for custom deletion timing, it solves the problem of "I probably won't need this, but I'd like to keep it around for a while in case I do; but I don't want to have to remember to manually delete it later."

reify• 11 months ago

Proton Mail offers a feature that allows you to easily unsubscribe from any mailing list you no longer wish to receive messages from.

I move all the crap emails to one folder and hit the "unsubscribe button" and lo and behold they all unsubscribe.

I then delete them all

https://proton.me/support/auto-unsubscribe

fph• 11 months ago

Random thought: why isn't LLM-based spam filtering ubiquitous yet? Some of the obvious spam that lands into my inbox would be caught easily even by the tiniest, cheapest models.

dpcx• 11 months ago

Seems like an llm keeping up with the amount of email that people receive would be cost prohibitive, either in dollars or cpu time.

torton3• 11 months ago

A simple, open-source spam filtering approach gets rid of 99.99% of spam. My total filtered email volume in a day is in the single to low double digits in the personal account and double digits at work. This is very much in range for LLM filtering of mail that passes the mechanical spam filter.

robterrell• 11 months ago

I have an appscript that uses Gemini for this. Works great. Usage is in in the free tier. I even had Gemini write the appscript.

bityard2• 11 months ago

I've heard multiple opinions that traditional spam filtering techniques work well enough. And as someone who has implemented many of them for work and personal email systems, that is true only if you consider low-effort spam that comes from dodgy networks and domains, doesn't get past a graylist, and fails simple content analysis.

High-effort spam is quickly becoming the norm and comes from spammers who take the time and expense to warm up their domain, correctly configure their DNS records, use TLS certificates and ports, are careful not to send too many messages to one provider at a time, address and format their emails to make them look like newsletters, and so on. Traditional spam mitigation system are not very effective against these techniques because it was always believed that spammers could never justify the expense of high-effort spam. That may have been true at one point, but it was silly to think it would always be true.

An LLM that can read an email and quickly perform sentiment/classification analysis on the content itself is the only thing that I can see which will fill that gap. (Aside from just choosing to live with it, of course.) I'm just getting into this myself but my understanding is that very small models can do this surprisingly well.

As to why it's not ubiquitous yet, I suspect it's only a matter of time. My Outlook (for work) has been automatically summarizing all of my emails for months now (something I can't opt out of, by the way). Hooking that up to an action that sends spam messages into the Junk Email folder is just a few lines of code on Microsoft's part.

apparent9• 11 months ago

I don't understand why gmail's spam filters aren't good enough to detect the AI slop founderspam that I get all the time. They're relatively short messages from people I've never emailed with with a vague unsubscribe message ("if you'd rather not hear from me again just say 'nah' and I'll desist") at the bottom.

At the very least, I'd think there would be an easy way to put all email from new senders in another folder, since these are almost always junk (and never require urgent review). Or am I the only one getting all this AI slop?

WaltPurvis• 11 months ago

put all email from new senders in another folder

I'm not getting any AI slop spam (or at least none that's made it past Gmail's spam filters), but I really like this idea of segregating email from new senders. That would be very useful.

apparent9• 11 months ago

Is there not a way to easily do this in gmail, either with a filter or otherwise?

It's sort of like those authentication systems (which force new senders to do a captcha or whatever before their email will deliver to you), but without the annoyance to senders.

sleepybrett• 11 months ago

... what is email?

utrack2• 11 months ago

To be honest, that Fastmail filter filters out almost every ad in any language.

{ "conditions": [ { "lookHow": "exists", "lookHeader": "list-unsubscribe", "lookFor": "exists \"list-unsubscribe\"", "lookIn": "header" } ], ... }

account424• 11 months ago

That's also going to match any legit mailing list you manually subscribed to though.

utrack2• 11 months ago

Yep - I put that rule at the bottom so that everything I want elsewhere is sorted by some preceding rule. That's how unfuck works too, though.

My ruleset looks like this now:

To: tix@domain -> to Tickets

To: travel@domain | Subject contains (tickets|billete) -> to Travel

(some specific mailing lists by sender) -> to Reads - those are the newsletters I want to read

From: *@(domains of banks I have) -> to Banks - obviously

From: *@linkedin.com -> to Linkedin; it's noisy but sometimes useful

Header list-unsubscribe exists -> to Ads

That's about it. I don't remember the last time something I didn't want reached my inbox, however I go to the ads and do a mass unsubscription every couple of months.

treetalker2• 11 months ago

I've developed my own custom system/methodology and set of Gmail filters to deal with this problem.

While Gmail's filters are generally pretty good, Gmail's system for organizing and managing those filters is terrible.

Does anyone know of an app or service that solves that problem?

paul7986• 11 months ago

Once gmail added labels way back when ive kept my inbox clean using a spam gmail address. Ive given that out for more then a decade to anyone not a friend, family or acquaintance. It gets forwarded to my real gmail address to a folder called "Zunk."

aldousd666• 11 months ago

This will focus on showing you only personal email. That may be what some people want, but my email is also for receipts from purchases and newsletters I deliberately subscribe to. Filtering out everything with an unsubscribe button is too blunt of an instrument for me. Sure it doesn't delete it, but... I won't know I got it. In my opinion, this is just a coy attempt to force their own mail to the inbox.

defanor• 11 months ago

Seems to be for Gmail and Fastmail specifically, and for some reason it calls those "clients" (rather than mail service providers).

kmoser• 11 months ago

Arguably they're clients as well, since they provide a web-based (client) interface.

That aside, I'm wondering how hard it would be to provide these filters in formats for other clients (I'm thinking of Thunderbird in particular). If nothing else, maybe somebody could convert the GMail/FastMail versions.

kevin_thibedeau• 11 months ago

I had to create a filter for the top 200 names of a certain nationality to tame the insane levels of recruiter spam I receive for a resume I haven't released publicly in over 15 years.

runjake• 11 months ago

This is a dumb name that will limit your user base.

apparent9• 11 months ago

Give this version away for free and then sell the corporate-friendly clone for $. If purposeful, it would be an interesting way of "feature-gating".

WhyNotHugo• 11 months ago

I have a bunch of filters which move bulk email into a separate mailbox, so they don't hit my INBOX.

The main and most useful filter matches emails with the `List-Unsubscribe` or `List-ID` headers.

I looked through the filters in op, and my main concern is that they move emails to Archive rather than some dedicated mailbox, so you'll never see them, and can only find them by digging through emails which you've _actually_ archived.

apparent9• 11 months ago

Yeah this was my concern as well:

Nothing gets deleted - All emails are preserved, just better organized

If they're not being moved into dedicated folders, then it becomes impossible to bulk-delete them when you start bumping into storage limits.

BitsAndObjects2• 11 months ago

I took a look at the list of filters before finishing the import. I'm left wondering what the point is. Gmail has quite effective spam filtering and email subscription management, making these filters almost entirely redundant. The few emails that would be caught by these filters that do currently enter my inbox are ones I actually want to see.

Also, the "allow all your own emails through", when I've not had to subscribe to your mailing list to get the download, seems a bit suspect to me. The argument of "this let's us contact you if the mail filters are updated" doesn't fly, because you shouldn't have my email address in the first place.

captn3m0• 11 months ago

I’d love a SIEVE version of this.

Show HN: Smart email filters to unfuck your email

Related Stories