Help me find a solution to my email problem

I delete 19 of every 20 emails that I get to my personal account.  That means I am clicking on the majority of my mail, doing work for crap I don't want. I would rather click on the minority, only click on stuff I want.  So what I am looking for is an email program that allows me to 1) flag emails with a single click and 2) automatically delete all un-flagged e-mails after a set period of time.  

This would allow me to simply click on the stuff I want to keep and ignore the rest.  No need to unsubscribe or set preferences, just ignore it and it will eventually go away. And when I am done with an e-mail, I simply unflag, knowing it will soon go away.  Or I can save it or archive it of course. 

Does anyone know of something that will do this?  I have tried Outlook and MacMail and Spark and Einstein and some others, but nothing will allow me to do it. I am OK setting up rules on the Mac as long as I can flag on the iPhone. 

I do something along those lines, but unfortunately my methods require that you have access to the server and can run software on it (I run my own email server). Not much help unfortunately .

Gmail will let you select multiple emails and move them to another folder. So the stuff I want to read, I move, then you can select everything else with one click and delete them. 

Not sure that helps you any. 

Gmail also allows you to set a VIP list.

I think you have the workflow backwards, however. Instead of flagging the emails you want to read, select all the ones you don't and delete them. Pretty much every email program gives you the ability to bulk delete.

And take the time to unsubscribe, it's worth it in the long run. Also pay more attention to signing up!

I've never seen a mail client that operates that way. You could probably use a hook in Outlook, or another client, to accomplish that however.

The easier solution would be drag and drop what you want to keep into a sub folder then CTRL+A then Delete

I just ignore them. I think both of my Gmail accounts have approaching 10k unread emails. 

For years I would delete everything, now I just don't click on it.

I was trying out the filter method in gmail, filtering all the E36 M3 I don't want directly into trash. I think I need to change that all around to an "only show me stuff from XXXX" list but I don't know how. 

On average, I filter to spam 300 emails a week, and they keep coming into my damn inbox anyway. 

What really pisses me off is how many of them don't have unsubscribe links at all, or those that do have links but they go to nonexisting websites. 

RevRico said:

I was trying out the filter method in gmail, filtering all the E36 M3 I don't want directly into trash. I think I need to change that all around to an "only show me stuff from XXXX" list but I don't know how. 

On average, I filter to spam 300 emails a week, and they keep coming into my damn inbox anyway. 

What really pisses me off is how many of them don't have unsubscribe links at all, or those that do have links but they go to nonexisting websites. 

Don't use the unsubscribe function, it just proves to them that they have a live address.  Much like answering robo calls.  There are rules you can build in gmail to move messages from certain senders, etc. 

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6579?hl=en

Keith Tanner said:

Gmail also allows you to set a VIP list.

I think you have the workflow backwards, however. Instead of flagging the emails you want to read, select all the ones you don't and delete them. Pretty much every email program gives you the ability to bulk delete.

And take the time to unsubscribe, it's worth it in the long run. Also pay more attention to signing up!

I WANT the workflow backward, why should I have to invest my time and energy in getting rid of things I didn't ask for in the first place?  Imagine walking through the grocery store and putting a sticker on every item you DON'T want, and the store selling you what was left over.  Or Amazon sending you everything they sell, and you have to return ship what you don't want.  That's insane, but we do it for e-mail every day. 

Unsubscribing is fine, but its work I have to do and it never stops the spam anyway. If I get 300 emails in a day, I want to scan the list, click on the 4 that I want to keep, and ignore the rest knowing that they will just disappear without me having to lift a finger.   Are there any App developers out there? I've got a project for you. 

Most email clients will have a feature called "rules" or "filters" that should be able to do what you are describing.  I use Gmail, and it includes a fairly robust way to define filters and you could conceivably create such filters to apply a label to emails from known addresses you want to recieve to a "good mail" folder that you actually read.  Or other email into a "garbage" label so it never appears in the default inbox.

Thunderbird has very nice mail filtering and handles junk mail 99% perfectly. And its free and it does not have google's microscope shoved up your bum.

https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/

pinchvalve said:

Keith Tanner said:

Gmail also allows you to set a VIP list.

I think you have the workflow backwards, however. Instead of flagging the emails you want to read, select all the ones you don't and delete them. Pretty much every email program gives you the ability to bulk delete.

And take the time to unsubscribe, it's worth it in the long run. Also pay more attention to signing up!

I WANT the workflow backward, why should I have to invest my time and energy in getting rid of things I didn't ask for in the first place?  Imagine walking through the grocery store and putting a sticker on every item you DON'T want, and the store selling you what was left over.  Or Amazon sending you everything they sell, and you have to return ship what you don't want.  That's insane, but we do it for e-mail every day. 

Unsubscribing is fine, but its work I have to do and it never stops the spam anyway. If I get 300 emails in a day, I want to scan the list, click on the 4 that I want to keep, and ignore the rest knowing that they will just disappear without me having to lift a finger.   Are there any App developers out there? I've got a project for you. 

I was ASSuming that the unwanted email was from legitimate mail sources. My wife, for example, is subscribed to every single clothing and shoe and athletic event source in the world. They're all people she's done business with and has chosen to receive their emails, but she's flooded with the stuff. My father is the same way, and I'm having to deal with his email traffic these days because he can't. Unsubscribing from those does work. It takes a little bit of work at first but it is  effective.

Now, if your problem is actual spam, then you need a spam filter. That's a totally different thing. I went to gmail years ago because of how good their spam identification is, so I simply don't see it anymore. That's on an email address that's been highly public for over 20 years. I don't have to select the 4 messages I want to see out of 300 of them because 296 of them are automatically in the spam folder and get automatically deleted after 30 days. Sound familiar? I played around with the trainable filters for years with Eudora but gmail just plain kills it dead.

As an aside...having a company ship you a bunch of stuff and you return what you don't want is actually a very common technique these days. People are subscribing to "curated boxes" of...stuff...that they then go through and keep what they want. Based on the explosion of these things out there, it's working very well.

I poked around in gmail a little last night, and saw they have a “VIP” list that you can setup.  If you use their “priority” inbox with that list setting things to priority, it’ll show in the upper third of the email page.

read what you want, archive if you want, delete otherwise.

the only “hard part” will be figuring out a way to transfer the stuff not in priority into the trash automatically after “x” days.

ymmv

I think you might be tilting at windmills.  To me, it's the receiving that is the pain, and while my spam filter is pretty good, it sometimes is a wee bit too good. "Where is that statement I was looking for? Why is my supplier with a perfectly legitimate address seen as spam?"

So, in the time it takes me to scan each email title, I can click the garbage can icon on each one.  Irritating, but an inevitable part of modern life.

bentwrench said:

Thunderbird has very nice mail filtering and handles junk mail 99% perfectly. And its free and it does not have google's microscope shoved up your bum.

 

https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/

Thunderbird has extensions now. Perhaps there is on that does what you need.