Email is good.

A blog ostensibly about email productivity by Chris Coyier who you can email, obviously, at chris@coyier.com

🙏

Just a little appreciation for the work that most email providers put into filtering spam from our inboxes. I feels like it stopped working for a few hours this weekend on my Gmail account and maybe 20-30 slipped through for me. Not a big deal, cleaned up, and it’s all back to normal.

Screenshot of an email inbox displaying various messages, including notifications for spam and account reminders.

But I’ve known several people, my mom for one and a co-worker for another, who have had email setups where it was just like this, or worse, all the time. Whatever system they had in place just wasn’t capturing spam (or wasn’t capturing enough of the spam) so that it was a regular task for them manually clearing it out.

That’s really just not feasible. That’s taking up super valuable brain time. You are going to resent email and not have it be an effective tool for you if the work you do in your inbox is just janitorial.

My main experience is with Gmail, and despite the hiccup this weekend, it’s amazing at this job. In perusing my spam folder, I get ~100 a day. I know I would feel entirely different about email if it was my job to clear those every day.

What’s everyone else’s spam situation like? Totally handled? Few slip in each day? Are you clearing dozens or hundreds a day by hand?

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2 responses to “🙏”

  1. L V Avatar
    L V

    At this point, the only spam I get is from marketing emails I forget (or am to lazy) to unsubscribe to.

    This is much better than it was a decade ago for me. I made the mistake when I was (much) younger of putting my email into one of those “free iphone giveaway” sites. Of course, it was just a ruse to collect email addresses and shortly after my ISP-provided email was 95% unfiltered spam. Verizon’s server-side filtering was absolute garbage and only caught one or two things a week out of hundreds. It’s what drove me to stop using Verizon’s webmail entirely and access the account only through Thunderbird as the SpamAssassin plugin was the only way to combat it. I still use the account to sign up for accounts where I want emails but don’t want the push notifications sent to my phone, and luckily the new management of the email domain (AoL) seems to do a much better job at their server-side filters.

    Reply
  2. Martin Avatar
    Martin

    Gmail no spam 🙂 but non deletable without opening ads 🙁

    Proton good but don’t use it that much yet.

    Apple mail learned fast. Few slip but most don’t.

    I think at the end of the day it has to do with how “used” your address is. It got much better with masks, forwards or renewing addresses altogether.

    Reply

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