✉️ Email filters

Email is an amazing technology -- the only widespread decentralized communication tool we have. But most of us are flooded with email. The fundamental problem is when we get emails from so many different sources, projects, and contexts flowing into one inbox. The context switching as we go from one email to the next is very expensive.

Email filters which automatically put emails into folders can help tame this problem. Gmail already tries to do this automatically with their Primary, Promotions, Social, and Updates. However, we can also do things like the following:

• filter emails for every project/context into a separate folder. You can trigger of senders, subject, etc.
• filter notifications from workflow tools (Github, Trello, etc.) into folders. If there are separate projects, then create separate folders for each project.
• filter email newsletters into two folders: news-high-priority, and news-low-priority -- the former is the ones you want to read, and the latter you just browse occasionally.
• create a "personal" folder that emails outside of work get filtered into.

This is automation that makes information easier to process. Of course some emails will still slip into your inbox, but for most of our email, everything is grouped into a single context. This greatly improves our efficiency in processing them.

The critical thing is to use an email client that makes it easy to create filters. Thunderbird works pretty well.