Episode: 3972
Title: HPR3972: Thunderbird inbox filtering: keeping a clean/orderly inbox.
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3972/hpr3972.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 18:08:31

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3972 for Tuesday the 24th of October 2023.
Today's show is entitled, Thunderbird Inbox Filtering Keeping a Clean and Orderly Inbox.
It is hosted by some guy on the internet, and is about 11 minutes long, it carries a clean
flag. The summary is, Scotty talks about filtering you in box.
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Hello and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio. I'm your host, some guy
on the internet. Today, let's talk about Thunderbird. I know I've done a couple of shows
on Thunderbird in past, and you guys should check those out if you're wondering about
how to use Thunderbird. This time I'm going to actually include an image, and I'm going
to keep it a little more specific. We're going to be talking about the inbox only in Thunderbird
and a couple of filters to help keep your inbox clean.
Well like I've discussed in previous episodes, I have numerous categories in my filters that
pull out things like banking, education, etc. from the inbox into their own private
directories. Then only things that's left is, well, stuff I don't really feel like filtering,
right? There's going to be small bits and pieces that I'm just not really wanting to
create filters for or add to existing filters. Maybe they are relevant in some way.
So let's talk about that. Messages that you receive in your inbox that you do not want
to archive, but they're not scam material either, right? They're not any form of threat
or security risk. So they could just be garbage rubbish, right? So one of the things I
do to keep my junk in my inbox to a minimal is I have a seven day rule, and it's composed
of three filters mainly. Now I put these three filters near the bottom of my filter stack.
One of the images you'll see my filter stack. I have a number of items in my filter stack
redacted because they're very private. I don't want all that out in the world, but you'll
see toward the bottom. I have them highlighted in a little box down there. It'll say, mark
is red, two days, tag rubbish, five days, delete rubbish, seven days. Those three filters
keep my inbox very clean. And I'll tell you how they work, right? Whenever new messages
come into the inbox, I want the new messages to always stand out. So anything over two days
old, that first filter of the three, which is mark red two days, well, anything that's
over two days old will be marked as red so that it's no longer bold. So only the freshes
of messages that arrive into the inbox will remain bold and like highlighted so that they're
easier to just see on a glance. Everything else will be marked as red. So they'll still
be there just not as they just won't stand out as much. Now the second filter of those three,
which is the tag rubbish five days. Any message left in the inbox that is over five days
old will automatically receive the rubbish tag. Yeah, the rubbish tag. I give it a color
that is like a to me is a disgusting brownish green color that reminds me of something I'd
never want to encounter. Anything that gets tagged as rubbish clearly means this has got to go.
We need it to go away, but I don't manually delete it. I just leave it there because anything
left in the box after seven days, which is the third filter delete rubbish seven days old.
And it has the rubbish tag applied to it. The filter deletes that message from the inbox. Now what
this means is I have seven days basically to decide what I want to do with that message. Either I
want to archive it, build a filter to start filtering messages out from that domain, whatever,
or just leave it there because in seven days, it'll it'll be gone anyways. I don't have to touch
it. Now this is helpful. If you're like me and you sign up for steam and you have all these
bunch of messages like whenever you have things on your steam wish list, steam sends you these
reminder emails. Now I don't mind receiving emails from steam. There's a bunch of them I want to
keep like whenever I buy a game, I'll get the invoice. I want to keep that. If ever I log in from
a different computer, which I rarely do, it's normally whenever I wipe my computer and then I have
to read login to steam. I get a message saying you've logged in from a different computer. I like
having that email and I also have a tag applied to that type of message so that it comes in as important.
Meaning if I did not log into another computer yet, I get that email. I want it to be big and bold
in red letting me know, Hey, your account was just logged into a computer somewhere else. You need
to you need to look at that. But that's another filter. I'm not going to talk about that right now.
Either way, I got a nice little filter structure here. I put some numbers to the right of the filters,
you know, just the first three letting you know in order how the filters are applied. These three
that I've discussed here, the mark read two days, the tag rubbish five days and the delete rubbish
seven days. I put all the way down at the bottom of the stack next to my manual filters because
say for instance, if I forget for whatever reason, like if I get sick or something and I just don't
feel like checking my email for a couple of days, you know, three, four days, when I do load up
Thunderbird again, you know, I don't want those to be the first filters that run. You know what I'm saying?
Because what will happen then is all my other filters that I have will not get a chance to save
messages and pull them into their private categories, you know, their private directories. So I want
all of that to happen first before the inbox cleaning filters can do their magic. Now typically keep
my trash and junk directories empty. So that way, whenever new things get added, especially if one
is added by accident, I can just go fish that out pretty easily. You know, I won't have to fish
through a ton of messages to find the one that I want. I just go grab the one out there and,
you know, save it. Now, before we end this episode, I'll just talk to you a little bit about the
first three that I have up there. You'll see they're numbered 0, 0, 0, 1 and 0, 2 at the very top
of the filter stack that deleted up there. That's for newsletters. I currently no longer wish to
receive anything from, you know, not that they're bad or they're junk mail. It's just, you know,
maybe I've grown out of that newsletter and I just need a break from it. I don't want to see it
anymore. Now I'm not going to unsubscribe for anything, right? That's a waste of time going and
unsubscribing. As some of you may have found out by now, there are places that apply shady tactics.
You attempt to unsubscribe and they try to make you go through like this long list of steps in order
to unsubscribe or they make it virtually impossible for you to unsubscribe. I've had political campaigns
contact me in the past and this is many years ago. I mean, I'm probably still receiving messages
from them, but my filters work so great. I never actually see them anymore. But in the past, before
I got set up the way that I am now, I would attempt to unsubscribe. The problem is the moment you
click on the unsubscribe button, it takes you to the page where you're supposed to, you know, select
your options for unsubscribing, but then it immediately redirects you so you never actually get
a chance to select what you want. And it'd be all sorts of shady practices like this where you
know, it's like screw it. Why? Why unsubscribe? Why go through all of that headache and I've even
seen services, they're advertising services now where grant this company unfettered access to your
email account and they will unsubscribe you from blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Why do that? Simply
throw that domain into a filter and be done with them. They're gone now. You never see them again.
Now tell me, is that not the same thing as unsubscribing, right? It is never seen again. So with that
first filter, the deleted again, just newsletters I'm no longer interested in. The second one, which
has the zero one to the right of it, that's called junk domains. Yeah, that's actual junk,
crap like, you know, the political campaign. Once you end up on any political campaign list,
you never come off and they basically toss you onto every other list known to man. So you're in
it for the long haul. That's okay because the moment I actually get a message from a campaign
that I've never received before. So now and all of a sudden my inbox shows a new campaign message.
I smile because now I finally get to do something again, right? Like email is interesting again
because now that I have Thunderbird, email has become pretty boring. Like, I no longer have any
troubles. Nothing ever shows up anymore. So, you know, I finally get some junk to deal with. I
throw it in the filter and then, you know, now it's back to boring again. Now it's gone. And then
there's junk subjects. And that's roughly the same thing. It's not used that much. It's only like
one or two things that'll happen for. But those, yeah, I'll just leave it at that. Now, you also
look down there. You see scams. Yes. Anytime I receive a scat like most Gmail addresses never reach
my inbox. I have Gmail automatically pulled out and thrown in a scam folder. Now anyone that I
know of, they uses a Gmail address. There's a filter just above that. You can't see it because it's
redacted. But those people's Gmail accounts are in that filter. So that way they don't get caught in
it. But everything else does because that's where the vast majority of my scam emails come from.
These random Gmail accounts pretending to be Amazon or nor Nanavirus or whatever, you know,
but lately I've been getting less and less of those. You know, I haven't received very many
scams. I think the last one I received is back in April. So email has gotten really boring for me.
I've been kind of waiting for more scams, more interesting things. I have to go out and find trouble
these days. If you're having trouble with email and you want this boring life that I have where
email is just figured out and it just works on its own, you know, just kind of chugs long. All you
have to do is open it. Well, here's some ideas. You know, here's a few things you can use. And if
you like some more detail, I'll be doing more of these Thunderbird shows in the future. But that's it
for now. Catch you guys in the next episode. Take it easy.
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