I’ve got two domain names set up for work and personal email, but I’m absolutely drowning in unread emails, around 4,000. Most are those annoying notifications like “Your security code is xxx,” “Your parcel has shipped,” and requests to rate my experience.
Right now, I’ve been trying out Inbox Zero with an old Gmail account. It’s cool, but honestly feels a bit overkill and only works with Gmail and Outlook. I switched to my own domains to get away from Google in the first place!
So, I’m on the hunt for an email provider that has solid SPAM filters and can create a priority inbox without all the pesky notification clutter. Bonus points if it supports custom domains.
Any suggestions?
I can recommend the Spark Desktop email client, you can use it for free and without subscribing.
I’m not self hosting email but my rule is that no email gets to be in the inbox except for VERY rare exceptions
When an email lands in my inbox, I immediately make a rule that labels it correctly and moves it the fuck away from my inbox.
This way I can have notifications on for inbox emails and they’ll either be important or a new sender whose next email will end up labeled and NOT in my inbox
Regardless of which e-mail service you end up using, I find that an incredible simple rule to filter all e-mail with the word “unsubscribe” in it’s body to another folder saves your sanity. It’s still a folder you should go through a few times a week to read all the newsletters and shit you’re subscribed to, and sometimes the occasional false positive, but your inbox will mostly contain e-mail you actually want to read. I have another rule that filters mail from specific senders that I want to read immediately to my Inbox before it hits the unsubscribe rule, but those exceptions are uncommon enough (I only have 7 after years of doing this) to not take much work.
Do you not sign up for any newsletters?
you can use kill-the-newsletter to receive those via rss
Doesn’t work, in my experience.
Brilliant tip. Thank you
This is a great tip!
but I’m absolutely drowning in unread emails, around 4,000
WTF are you doing with your e-mail address that you get these amounts of mails. These are more mails than I got in the last decade.
At first maybe try to unsubscribe whatever you subscribed and stop putting your address into random services. Use a temporary mail for stuff like that.
Also mail filters can help with sorting mails from certain senders into folders. Bascially every provider has them and if not programs like Thunderbird have these built in on the client side.
Most are those annoying notifications like “Your security code is xxx,” “Your parcel has shipped,” and requests to rate my experience.
Uhm simply delete them when you e.g. inputted the code or got your parcel? Or change the settings that you no longer get them?
So, I’m on the hunt for an email provider that has solid SPAM filters…
Under your circumstances no provider in the world can do that, because nobody can determine if your “Your security code is xxx” mail is spam or legitimate… YOU have to determike that for yourself.
Don’t unsubscribe, just send to spam. Unsubscribe just confirms you’re a real person and you get put on a list for more spam. Spam folder achieves the same thing without sending any sort of signal back to the sender. Also if enough people flag it, it’ll go in my spam folder automatically. Thank you for your service.
I use my own version of inbox zero.
I manually archive emails I might need in the future (like rent payment confirmations, job position applications that got past the screening interview, official correspondence with local administrative bodies, and very few other things).
I keep things that need action or are ongoing in the inbox (like online orders until they arrive, event tickets).
I delete useless emails (newsletters, code confirmations, online order emails or event tickets once the order arrives or the event passed) possibly preceded by unsubscribing.
That’s it, I usually have 0 to 3 emails in my inbox. No plugins, no filters.
How about using sieve rules? A nice plus is that if you ever move to self-hosted in the future, you can bring it with you.
I know at least Fastmail supports user-configured sieve. I don’t have experience with Fastmail myself but in general mostly heard good things.
https://www.cstrahan.com/blog/taming-email-with-fastmail-rules/
I’ve been using Sieve on Dovecot (Pidgeonhole) for years and it’s great. Earlier I had Procmail, which is fine, too. The only disadvantage is that I’d need to login on my server to edit the rules, while Sieve is directly editable in email clients.
I use the Thunderbird email client to set up filters which send email to set folders.
Same. pfsense will filter a lot of spam with Spamhaus_Drop type feeds. Then T-Bird with a lot of rules for different sorting options. Also, I use a lot of alias email addresses so those are easy to filter right into the trash can. It’s interesting to watch who sells my aliases.
You can do most of that without any fancy AI or machine learning: Since you already have your own domain, setup some mail redirects and filter all mails going into them into subfolders. I have a redirect for onlineshopping where all those order confirmation and delivery informations and unwanted newsletters go. I have another I use for creating accounts - all 2FA etc. are going there. And then I have the main mail for actual communication and another redirect for all those interesting substack newsletters and so on.
One of these can just be solved with a mailbox rule within the email client itself for what it’s worth. Make a rule that’s based on keywords in the subject line and have them moved into a folder that you clear out every couple of months. Downside is the email client need to be running/opened for it to process them.
Did anyone try CLI clients, like (neo)mutt for that? I expect it can be set up on a server (if we consider self-hosting) and do this job automatically. While all the AI thingy feels like magic, my practical experience shows that there are just some keywords or even just the sender, with which mails can be sorted.
It sounds like notmuch is your bag. While it has its own CLI, it also works great with neomutt, aerc, and others.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=pBs_P_1--Os
You can also do very powerful presorting with sieve if your server supports it.
Thanks for not much, I have never heard of it before.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters IMAP Internet Message Access Protocol for email IP Internet Protocol SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
[Thread #988 for this comm, first seen 9th Jan 2026, 10:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Get a proton mail. The complete plan not only supports custom domains, they also let you create unlimited alias.
This is the best thing ever. Alias work with custom domains too and they basically give you an endless amount of single-use emails allowing you to sign to each service/website with a different email (that will then be forwarded to your inbox).
This not only leaves your real email safe and unexposed, but it also lets you organize your inbox more tidily if your aliases have a structure and you use email rules for them (e.g. you can create aliases for your shipping stuff called [website].shipping@[myalias].com and then make a rule including all the adresses .shipping to a specific folder).
Everyone suggests proton and their whole infra just makes me sus. Just because of how much they are the “go to” alternative.
Maybe I’m paranoid. But I feel like these companies that focus on “privacy” are just not as good as we all assume.
It’s like all the YouTube sponsored segments of “Ingogni”. It just makes me feel like these companies that sell “privacy” are just consolidating data on the people that are worried about their privacy.
This is less a comment about proton I guess. But, incogni, is sus as fuck. Like, really, “give us all your personal info and we’ll “scrub” it from the internet, trust us.”
Are they sharing your emails. Probably not. But I just don’t really trust anything.
Edit: lots of strong responses. Which I appreciate. But, my comment was more “vibes” based on Proton. But I’ll take a stand on these “Ingogni” types services. I think they are sus as fuck.
If you don’t trust anything, then your only option is self-host everything,
Is Proton perfect? Not at all. Are they better than Google? Well… if you trust the external audits (1) and external sources in general (2), then, they probably are.
But if you don’t trust anything, then you probably don’t trust those audits either, so it’s pointless to even mention them.
This comment describes Brave browser
Ingogni is super suspicious and I don’t believe what they claim to do is even possible. But to me it’s what they claim to do that makes them suspicious, and that’s and entirely different thing than what proton does, and at least proton has documented audits to back up their privacy claims. INB4 the links to articles talking about proton complying with law enforcement requests, every company does that, even respected ones like mullvad. It’s not important that they hand over information they’re legally required to, it’s important that they save as little as possible so they can hand over everything without identifying you.
And also, any privacy conscious service is never better than your own opsec, so if you get caught because your recovery email was your apple ID, that’s on you and not them.
Guys…it’s Incogni. Like incognito?
Incogni feels like a product the data brokers created to double tap your data and get paid for doing it.
Hasnt Proton assisted law enforcement in freezing, locking out or providing access to some person?
I remember that happen.They comply with the law to the extent that they absolutely have to.
I’ve heard of locking/freezing accounts, but the only case where a person got identified (that I’ve heard of) was because the user used their apple ID mail for recovery and got identified that way from the information handed over.
Nvmd.
What I had in memory was false.
The provided IPs but not decrypted mails or access to the inbox.Besides that they also suspended inboxes.
Why would they be sus? They’re a Switzerland based company which means really good privacy laws in regards to keeping your data out of the wrong hands. They’re not going to monetize your emails or information, which is a big deal!
Incogni, you’re right, give us your data so we know what to scrub? No thanks lol. Feels like the wrong approach lol
Unlike those “we will delete your data for you.” Services. Proton operates under a Zero Knowledge Encryption, I.E. no one even themselves can read your emails.
Is it perfect? No obviously, if you use a recovery email that is not properly secured (say a Gmail account.) then congratulations your now vulnerable via the State asking Google.
But the privacy focus IS genuine
It’s just ad-bait. Proton will hand your ass over to whatever authorities.
That’s the thing though, you don’t need to trust them, you trust public key cryptography. And unless the NSA has secretly solved that, Proton cannot hand anything to anyone, because they can’t access anything but encrypted data.
If the NSA solved that, they don’t need Proton’s cooperation, they can just intercept the encrypted traffic directly.
You don’t need to trust Proton inherently, all their apps are open source and you can verify the encryption yourself. They hold your encrypted data and you hold the keys.
The only thing they could be lying about is keeping VPN logs, but there’s no credible reason to believe they are. They do annual third-party audits of their infrastructure to confirm no logs, but if you’re depending strictly on VPN to hide data you think the government is interested in, you’re doing it wrong.
They cannot hand over your emails, because they don’t have the keys. But email is an inherently insecure communication method, and any email you send to a non proton recipient is visible to that recipient’s provider.
They can see the subject line and the recipient’s address, because they need to know where to transfer the email and send notifications with the subject line, but they are transparent about that.
Are you basing this on anything? I agree with another poster that proton being the go to alternative is somewhat suspect in my paranoid brain but some of these remark here seem pretty outlandish.
Proton has been involved in some situations but it’s like the scenario I provided.
Accounts having an unencrypted line of entry “we can’t get the information off the Proton Server but the account is connected to a Google server so let’s go to Google instead.”
Or Proton not particularly putting up a hard fight against a government request. (Mind you no information is being handed over just an account being turned off with no means to recover)
Sure I saw yours and accept that, but “hand your ass over” doesn’t equate to “complies minimally with legal request they have to in order to remain functioning as a business” in my book.
https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/proton-mail-discloses-user-data-leading-to-arrest-in-spain/18191
Before that: https://www.wired.com/story/protonmail-amends-policy-after-giving-up-activists-data/
There are many, many more cases we don’t hear about in media.
If you consistently connect to Proton via I2P or tor and don’t link a phone number or tracable recovery mail, you’re covering up at least some of the juicy metadata.
Thanks for the links, the recovery email aspect was covered in the initial comment old mate was replying to. I was more interested in if the hand your ass over remark had anything to do with the “they cant read your emails”/encryption part. The second link is very interesting though:
After providing the activist’s metadata to Swiss authorities, ProtonMail removed the section that had promised no IP logs, replacing it with one saying, “ProtonMail is an email that respects privacy and puts people (not advertisers) first.”
Auhorities in other European countries are known to MitM SSL certs at VPS providers for years already. Switzerland is moving their legislation towards the EU direction. Proton themselves have been vocal about their concerns about this.
How long until someone realizes they can demand Proton to inject some extra JS into the webmail for desired targets? Folks in a sensitive situation should follow the established best-practice of not relying on remotely served JS for client-side encryption. To be safe against this vecor, handle your encryption and signing outside of the webmail; either in your own client or copy/pasting.
Google it.
Burden of proof is on you.
No it isn’t.
Proton has successfully shilled itself as the go-to alternative when they’re just another shitass company. They’re better than Google, but like congratulations on passing the lowest bar, I guess?
Notice how he recommended Proton mail without addressing any of the issues OP was having. Blind shilling. If this was Reddit, I’d genuinely think he was paid for it, or a bot.
They addressed all the OPs requirement excluding remarking on the spam filter. What are you even talking about.
a priority inbox without all the pesky notification clutter.
Being able to sort incoming aliases doesn’t address this, which was the only problem OP was having, but whatever man. Use Proton; I’ll be here when they crash and burn like every other fuckin company that has had their business model before them.
Exactly how does that not solve the issue? If you create aliases with a logical structure, you can filter all your aliases in folders, removing any notification coming from whatever you can filter. Sure, I understand you hate proton, yadda yadda. But the issue is solved that way, you may dislike it, but saying it’s not solved is lying.
Go be edgy somewhere else, but maybe, take some relaxing tea before that, you might find internet more enjoyable if you don’t attack people just for expressing their opinions. Or, if you really can’t, you might go back to reddit yourself, where you can create your bubble in which different opinions don’t have space.
I’m sorry if I offended your favorite company or whatever this is about
Nah it’s just your claim of them of addressing none of the OPs concerns and being a blind shill is objectively wrong and you’e in your feelings about that being pointed out to you.
Mate, I couldn’t care less about Proton as a company. I use them that’s all. I’m an adult who doesn’t define themselves by the company they choose.
You straight up lied about me not adressing any of OP concerns and now are, again, using ad hominem crap to avoid facing the fact that you lied and insulted me.
I mean, technically they asked for a SPAM filter, but in reality, when they’re subscribed to emails and lists they’ve signed up for, they’re marketing emails. Spam would be unsolicited and usually come from their data being sold off. The very fact those notification emails or marketing have the "unsubscribe"button lowers their spam score so they hit the inbox.
So, Proton, for example, claims to not sell off or monetize your data based on strict privacy laws from Switzerland. You don’t have to believe their claims, fine. They’re derived from scientists though, not businessmen. Didn’t seem like they’re prioritizing big money. So keeping spam away, this is a good way to do it. Doesn’t mean all the other companies OP has subscription emails for hasn’t sold their info, so it won’t be a fix-all.
OP sounds like they need to go through their emails occasionally to just unsubscribe to help clean it up lol. Really, using rules to filter key phrases would be easiest. The reason the aliases are suggested to help, bc the emails you really want to prioritize from any friends, family, or services you want to focus on, use the primary address. All others, like shopping for insurance, retail accounts, etc, use a junk one so you’re not bombarded. You’ll get a ton of marketing regardless, so that’s a great way to cut out the “spam” notifications.
I would go one step further and give banks/credit cards their own alias too, to avoid reusing the same address to help cut back on data breach info. I exclusively have a login email address and an alias for everything else. That way no one will ever know my login address to get to my account, unless the hosting company themselves are breached.
Op.
can create a priority inbox without all the pesky notification clutter
User.
(e.g. you can create aliases for your shipping stuff called [website].shipping@[myalias].com and then make a rule including all the adresses .shipping to a specific folder).
I.e avoiding shipping notification clutter by directing to folders. Don’t really disagree with the placing too much trust in one company for whatever it’s worth.
Whatever mate.
I’ll just address the point that directly attacks my comment as the rest looks like poor ragebait:
They wanted an organized inbox with spam filters and I told them about the aliases that let you do exactly that by making each sender have a specific address that let’s you create more efficient filters.
Fuck proton
lol at proton fanboys downvoting, you did some scrolling.
People are downvoting you because you’re being an ass, don’t give yourself too much credit
I’m gonna make a small reach here but are you willing to defend Andy Yen’s pro-trump stance? If not, why are you giving Nanook shit for saying fuck Proton?
I’m not even a proton user anymore, for several reasons including the politics of the founder.
It’s possible to be correct and also a dickhead, as evidenced by the way nanook is behaving in this thread.
Nah fanboys be fanboys
I have elaborate Procmail rules that sort out the mail. It’s not a very modern solution and the syntax is quite horrible, but it works quite well.
This is not strictly a self hosting answer, but given the problem you are describing, I think it is still relevant.
If you are already comfortable using an LLM based tool to manage email, take a look at SaneBox (this is not an LLM).
It is not an email provider and not an email client. It sits behind the scenes and works with almost any provider that supports IMAP, including custom domains. All the filtering, prioritization, and notification cleanup happens server side, so you keep your existing setup.
It excels specifically at what you are struggling with: automatically separating real human email from receipts, shipping notices, one time codes, and low value notifications, without forcing you into Inbox Zero workflows or Gmail specific features.
This probably won’t help you much, but Apple Mail has this feature regardless of the server.
