This is part 3 in my series about email management, with the prior one being about using email client apps. This one is about trying to use email filtering to handle email overload.

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You’re getting too much email

It’s a flood — no, a deluge! Hundreds of messages a day. Overwhelming. Demoralizing. Soul-crushing. The thought of even looking at your email provokes anxiety.

What to do?

Email filtering to the rescue! Use sieve (KMail even includes an app for it!) to implement a bevy of server-side filtering rules that send emails to different folders. So neat and tidy. So clean. So organized. So much better… not!

Filtering doesn’t work

You started with the problem of “I get too much email to comfortably handle”. With filtering, you’ve split up the “too much email” into multiple folders, but all those folders put together are still impossible to comfortably handle.

You may have told yourself that this system helps you prioritize, because the most important emails go to your inbox.

But it’s not true; an email’s importance can have much more to do with its content than the characteristics you’re probably using for filtering (sender, mailing list ID, subject line, etc).

For example:

You commented on a bug report, and then someone else replied to your comment with a question. The email notifying you about their reply got filtered into oblivion, so you missed it, and now that person thinks you’re rudely ignoring them, or negligent, or incompetent. That’s damage both to your reputation, and to KDE’s. This is what leads people to whine “KDE doesn’t care!” on social media.

Also, the properties you filter against change over time, which means mail filtering requires maintenance to keep the important emails in your inbox — maintenance that you’ll eventually tire of doing and neglect.

Which means some important emails will still be shunted away to folders you aren’t checking regularly. Which means you’re still missing them. Which means filtering hasn’t solved the problem of missing emails and being perceived as unreliable or rude.

I get it. Filtering is tempting. But it’s just covering up the actual problem. There are only three real solutions to “too much email”:

1. Spend more time processing emails

For a busy professional like you, email is a task list that other people can add items too.

This is terrible, but it’s also a professional obligation, so you need to block out time to handle those tasks somehow. Yet spending tons of time on it will burn you out!

So minimize this to only what’s absolutely necessary to avoid your inbox becoming more full over time. Make the “number of emails in the inbox” trend-line negative. Which means you need to…

2. Get fewer emails

Every minute you put into reducing emails will pay you back 100x over the next few years.

• The project you’re regularly working on or monitoring via a website? Turn off email notifications; you’ll see stuff on the website.
• That mailing list for a project you haven’t had any involvement with in years? Unsubscribe.
• Merge requests for a project you’re only tangentially interested in? Un-watch in your notification preferences.
• Notifications about things happening in real-time? Switch to a daily digest in your email preferences, or unsubscribe and set aside a time to check that thing manually.
• Marketing emails for literally everything? Unsubscribe.
• News? Unsubscribe unsubscribe unsubscribe! You’ll learn about anything important in another way.
• Emails about bills and payments you have to make? Put them on auto-pay, then delete the “payment submitted” emails without even looking at them.

And so on. In the “email as task list” model, you have to reduce the number of people, groups, and companies who can assign you email-tasks, or you’ll go mad. Do it, do it now!

3. Increase speed of processing emails

A key part of this is using an email client, which I wrote about earlier. Learn your tools! Use keyboard shortcuts. Aggressively delete and archive emails after you handle them. I like automatic color tagging, which I wrote about back in 2024. There are lots of techniques to process emails faster, and I’ll write about some of them later.

But focus on solving the problem, rather than hiding it.

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The important part is to see email as a job skill you can commit to getting better at, just like programming, debugging, or source management using git. Don’t accept that you suck at email, give up, and hide the problem under the rug. Get better! Filtering is a tool that holds you back and prevents you from learning stronger email management skills.

Ditch the filtering habit. It’ll be hard at first, but you can push through that and solve the real problems of too much email, un-optimized workflows, and fear of managing email due to lack of the first two.

You can do it! I believe in you!