5 ms·

Gmail auto labels

34 points by gsempe 9y ago

clra 9y ago
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 9y ago
  > 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.
dev1n 9y ago
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.
KeepFlying 9y ago
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.
latchkey 9y ago
Let me get this straight. If I email mathieu.passenaud+HAHAHAHA@gmail.com, I'll automatically create a label for him? Brilliant!
- mathieupassenau 9y ago
  Hi, yes that's it ! I have a "HAHAHAHA" label right now http://www.mathieupassenaud.fr/gmail-auto-labels/img/hahahahahah1.png http://www.mathieupassenaud.fr/gmail-auto-labels/img/hahahah...
  - latchkey 9y ago
    Ha, I love that someone actually tried it. Was not me though.
jedberg 9y ago
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.
- ProAm 9y ago
  Do you run into a lot of people selling your address? I do similar stuff and have found only 2 occasions over about a decade where I got an email from someone else (not counting spam from the company who the address was created for)
  - jedberg 9y ago
    Not often, but sometimes it's surprising. Companies that you wouldn't think would do it. Also sometimes one company sells it to many vendors. The worst offender was ScotteVest. I signed up for their list in I want to say 2001 or 2002. I can find at least 50 vendors they sold the email address to.
- mikeash 9y ago
  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.
tcarn 9y ago
Cool stuff. I've been using Google app scripts at work and they're very under utilized Imo.
- stringham 9y ago
  What kinds of things do you use it for?

34 points by gsempe 9y ago

clra 9y ago

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 9y ago
> 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.

dev1n 9y ago

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.

KeepFlying 9y ago

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.

latchkey 9y ago

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

mathieupassenau 9y ago
Hi, yes that's it ! I have a "HAHAHAHA" label right now http://www.mathieupassenaud.fr/gmail-auto-labels/img/hahahahahah1.png http://www.mathieupassenaud.fr/gmail-auto-labels/img/hahahah...
- latchkey 9y ago
  Ha, I love that someone actually tried it. Was not me though.

jedberg 9y ago

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.

ProAm 9y ago
Do you run into a lot of people selling your address? I do similar stuff and have found only 2 occasions over about a decade where I got an email from someone else (not counting spam from the company who the address was created for)
- jedberg 9y ago
  Not often, but sometimes it's surprising. Companies that you wouldn't think would do it. Also sometimes one company sells it to many vendors. The worst offender was ScotteVest. I signed up for their list in I want to say 2001 or 2002. I can find at least 50 vendors they sold the email address to.
mikeash 9y ago
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.

tcarn 9y ago

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

stringham 9y ago
What kinds of things do you use it for?