
Gmail auto labels - gsempe
http://www.mathieupassenaud.fr/gmail-auto-labels/
======
clra
Interesting.

I've recently gone through a bit of a reorganization of my inbox and filters,
and as a slight alternative, I found that generally speaking, most providers
are pretty good about keeping the "from" address that they send communication
from relatively stable. My filters basically look like lists of the form
`from:(custserv@clippercard.com OR receipts@messaging.squareup.com OR
Sony@email.sonyentertainmentnetwork.com)` and I apply a label like `orders`.

I have most of it still coming to my inbox so that I can vet each one quickly
before archiving, but from there they have an appropriate label applied, and
it's easy for me to go back and find them again. Some very common emails, like
when I get an email from Square as I buy a coffee, I add "skip my inbox" and
have it archive automatically.

It may be a little more manual in that occasionally I have to go in and add a
new email address to a filter, but so far I've found the required maintenance
to be very minimal (order of minutes every few months) and it saves me from
having to maintain a `+` address or script.

~~~
drinchev
> I found that generally speaking, most providers are pretty good about
> keeping the "from" address that they send communication from relatively
> stable.

My observation is a bit different. I noticed that the marketing teams usually
put a from address like "frank@service.com", "michael@" or any other first
name they use to make it more "personal". This makes my filtering a bit
difficult, since I usually want those e-mails to end up in "Newsletter" label,
but all others important from this address like "no-reply@service.com" to
remain in my inbox.

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jedberg
Using plus addressing is really handy, but unfortunately spammers figured it
out about 20 years ago. First, they would just strip the part after the plus,
and now sometimes I see them add stuff like +amazon or +facebook. It's still a
good trick, but you might get spam showing up that wouldn't otherwise.

The slightly better solution is to register a domain that is just for email,
and then allow any arbitrary email address to come to your main account, and
filter on that. You can even do it in Google. Register an app domain (although
I guess those aren't free anymore?) and then just set it to deliver all
unknown addresses to the default account (and then forward the default account
to your regular gmail while you transition).

I've been doing this for years, and it's a great way to figure out who is
selling your email address.

~~~
mikeash
I had wildcard emails on my domain for a long time. I gave it up after a
spammer decided to try a gigantic list of email usernames with my domain. They
wanted to spam a hundred thousand separate users, but ended up spamming me a
hundred thousand times instead. After that, I switched off the wildcard and
just set up a normal address.

This would probably not be as big of a deal if it happened today. This was in
the early 2000s and the tools (at least that I had) didn’t deal with huge
volumes nearly as well as I expect Google would. But I still haven’t gone
back.

~~~
jedberg
Yeah I had that happen when I was running my own mail server. Luckily I had a
procmail rule that would /dev/null dupes like that.

Haven't seen it happen with Google, so either the spammers stopped or more
likely Google just blocks it with all the other spam.

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latchkey
Let me get this straight. If I email mathieu.passenaud+HAHAHAHA@gmail.com,
I'll automatically create a label for him? Brilliant!

~~~
mathieupassenau
Hi, yes that's it ! I have a "HAHAHAHA" label right now

[http://www.mathieupassenaud.fr/gmail-auto-
labels/img/hahahah...](http://www.mathieupassenaud.fr/gmail-auto-
labels/img/hahahahahah1.png)

~~~
latchkey
Ha, I love that someone actually tried it. Was not me though.

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KeepFlying
Nice. I have to admit though I was hoping you would collect a list of email
addresses or domains in the script and tag it that way as well.

I'd love to take back control of my inbox from the google automatic filters. I
rarely check my mail because it ends up taking forever to parse through all of
those additional folders and filters.

My work email is all full of auto sorting rules. But my personal gmail lags
behind too much.

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dev1n
Nice!!

Had an idea about a year ago to build a machine learning model using Latent
Dirichlet Allocation to do topic discovery on email bodies. This would have
allowed automatic tagging of emails based on topics learned from historic
emails. If anyone is interested in the code let me know and I'll release it. I
got sort of far with it, just didn't know how to integrate / build a UI around
it.

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tcarn
Cool stuff. I've been using Google app scripts at work and they're very under
utilized Imo.

~~~
stringham
What kinds of things do you use it for?

