Show HN: Make your Gmail Inbox easier to use with a better rule manager
https://sortem.co/editor/5f8b13116e77616e832b08159bfdfa9e364e61f5
Been building something that will hopefully be useful to the community and Gmail users in general - would love to get any feedback / thoughts!So my Gmail inbox used to be a mess, especially after I signed up for a few newsletters. I tried creating filters by using "Filter messages like these", but I ended up with 50 rules that could be condensed to ~20. It was also difficult to get a good overview of what all the different rules are doing.
So a friend and I built a website called SortEm to help us out.
Check out some the rules we added in this link and apply them to your inbox if you find them useful!
The 10 rules in the link are for stuff like:
Marking large emails with the label ">10MB"
Marking emails from eBay and Amazon with "e-com" labels
Marking emails with keywords of newsletters and promotions as "Newsletter | Promotion" and making them skip the inbox
Marking emails with keywords of security notifications as "Security notification" and making sure they are in Primary
Marking emails from sites like GitHub, Reddit
etc.
BTW: In SortEm you can also upload a Gmail filter file, edit the different filters, add some useful filters that we collected from friends and from our own inboxes, and apply them all to your own Gmail. Also, you can create a unique link that will save your rules.
Would love to hear what you guys think, and feel free to spread the word! :)
Seeing some of these rules, it makes me think that email is more of a notification and receipt system than a messaging system – shuffling some of these things away is useful, because you _might_ want to go back to it later, but others it's more just emails meant to get your attention for a thing, and that thing is often buried in the email (or worse, behind a click).
Additionally, some of these could be a bad idea to skip the inbox with, such as the security notifications. 9/10 those are self-triggered, but in the one case where it's not, you _want_ to see it.
Anyway, cool thing. Didn't realize the rules were portable. I do think that the effort that has to go into vetting the "preselected" rules is roughly the same as just going through and coming up with them from scratch.