Dude, my email handling is a huge mess, no matter what angle we’re looking at it.

Let’s start with my private email on my private devices, as I have full freedom of doing whatever the fuck I want:

For more than 20 years up until about a year ago, my strategy was to keep everything in my inbox. That’s it. No custom folders, no labels, no filters. And I had been using the web UI, as it was clean, convenient and the search function was good, I always found everything I needed. I only deleted those emails that didn’t carry absolutely any value to me, like some promotions that didn’t automatically end up in Spam. I kept even registration confirmations just so I know when exactly I signed up on a website. This worked very well. At some point I created another account at a different provider, just to be able to pick a username that didn’t suck (as much as the previous one I made as a kid), and used that one for professional purposes only (job seeking basically).

Then as my long and painful degoogling process started last year, I signed up to proton (I should’ve done tuta instead), and I decided I wanna be more organized, because I’ve read how cool it was. I created a few aliases strategically: one I’d never share with anyone else other than financial institutions (I blew it right away with PayPal, because PayPal does share it with all webshops where you pay with it), I made one for personal communication (friends and family only), and a few others. Also, for a while I wanted to keep my old accounts to make sure I won’t miss changing my email somewhere important.

So I ended up with a crazy lot of email addresses, therefore I started to use Thunderbird on desktop and on mobile, but on mobile I also have to use proton mail, because there’s no proton bridge for mobile. But still, two email clients are manageable.

And I also started to create a meticulously designed folder structure in all my accounts, plus set up filters for every kinds of emails I regularly receive. I processed thousands of emails, and there are tens of thousands more in my inbox, and I’m so damn drained of dealing with them, I basically gave up. Now I have a half-baked solution, everything is all over the place.

I receive an email, I open it on my phone, but then I decide to deal with it later, and I forget to mark it unread. Then, when later comes, I try to open it on my computer, but I forgot which folder it was in (I have hundreds of folders by now), and it wasn’t marked as unread, so it wasn’t easy to spot. Also, generally, when I just receive an email, even if it’s clearly marked as unread, it’s still hard to spot, because the list is quite long on the left side when even just one account is not collapsed. I’d have to scroll a lot to actually see it.

Also, there are many emails that could fit in multiple folders. I hate that so much.

Thunderbird considerably slowed down due to the hundreds of filters, even though I have a pretty beefy desktop PC.

At work I don’t have much choice. We’re using Outlook and it sucks so much. I tried to do the same organization there, and even though I have much fewer emails there, I sucked at it the exact same way. It’s also a half-finished mess.

On top of that, Outlook filters don’t even work properly. You cannot apply the same condition twice within one filter (e.g. subject contains X AND subject contains Y), and those that I set up just simply stop working after a while. Some folders don’t indicate the count of new messages, some do. It’s the shittiest email software I’ve ever seen.

Overall I really like Thunderbird, it’s very flexible and it works well, I just suck at organizing my emails efficiently. Maybe I should just go back to the inbox-only mode, that one worked well.