Show HN: Smart email filters to unfuck your email (unfuck.email)

I used a paid for service to help clean out my gmail accounts.

I’m considering this, but curious if the name is a turn off for others like it does for me?

As a baby GenX(er), is that a generational thing?

Neat. The potty mouth adds nothing.

So everybody else's newsletters go to trash except theirs?

https://github.com/stevenirby/unfuckemail/blob/master/filter...

Maybe someone can explain this to me: Since forever Gmail auto-organized my newsletter/commercial emails with the `Notification`/`Promotional` labels, skipping the inbox, without special filters like this one.

Then, by a year or so, more and more promotional/commercial emails appeared in my inbox, and nowadays I delete 10/20 of those emails from my inbox daily. I don't understand as it worked flawlessly before. So, what happened here? Google fucked up this functionality or there is more?

Thank you!

Is this different from what e.g. Apple's Mail client already does with categories? Letting something read all my email is a big frictionful ask, so I tend to only do it for very-well-established entities.

Easy way to do this: search for the word "unsubscribe" in your email and delete all of them.

I did this 4 years ago on my personal email address and I never had to recover any email.

Nice work! will give it a try...

The page says "open source", but I don't see links to the source anywhere so I can see what filters installing this would add. I'm sure it's fine, but I wouldn't add a set of email filters without knowing what they were first.

Wait excuse me but what in the name of ever-loving fuck

    <entry>
      <category term="filter"/>
      <title>Mail Filter</title>
      <id>tag:mail.google.com,2008:filter:2682352652378687976</id>
      <updated>2025-08-21T11:26:31Z</updated>
      <content/>
      <apps:property name="from" value="(yes-reply@randomdailyurls.com OR yes-reply@unfuck.email)"/>
      <apps:property name="hasTheWord" value="category:(CATEGORY_PERSONAL)"/>
      <apps:property name="shouldAlwaysMarkAsImportant" value="true"/>
      <apps:property name="shouldArchive" value="false"/>
      <apps:property name="shouldNeverSpam" value="true"/>
    </entry>

I think I'll skip this.

Do americans really get that much spam? I don't see the point of this. You can unsubscribe most superfluous newsletters anyway and you have a spam filter. A few intelligently chosen folders and inbox zero is a piece of cake.

Doesn't gmail split email by promotions/social/updates by default now? I've had that for a long while and it keeps most important stuff in the inbox while hiding the mess.

I also have my own Google Apps Script app 'Gmaid' though to keep my inbox useable. It auto deletes / archives mail after X days when its tagged '3-day delete' or '5-day archive' etc. I have filters to apply appropriate tags and remove them if I want to keep something from being tidied. I wonder if I could use these filters to tag stuff that currently gets through?

Proton Mail offers a feature that allows you to easily unsubscribe from any mailing list you no longer wish to receive messages from.

I move all the crap emails to one folder and hit the "unsubscribe button" and lo and behold they all unsubscribe.

I then delete them all

https://proton.me/support/auto-unsubscribe

Random thought: why isn't LLM-based spam filtering ubiquitous yet? Some of the obvious spam that lands into my inbox would be caught easily even by the tiniest, cheapest models.

I don't understand why gmail's spam filters aren't good enough to detect the AI slop founderspam that I get all the time. They're relatively short messages from people I've never emailed with with a vague unsubscribe message ("if you'd rather not hear from me again just say 'nah' and I'll desist") at the bottom.

At the very least, I'd think there would be an easy way to put all email from new senders in another folder, since these are almost always junk (and never require urgent review). Or am I the only one getting all this AI slop?

... what is email?

To be honest, that Fastmail filter filters out almost every ad in any language.

{ "conditions": [ { "lookHow": "exists", "lookHeader": "list-unsubscribe", "lookFor": "exists \"list-unsubscribe\"", "lookIn": "header" } ], ... }

I've developed my own custom system/methodology and set of Gmail filters to deal with this problem.

While Gmail's filters are generally pretty good, Gmail's system for organizing and managing those filters is terrible.

Does anyone know of an app or service that solves that problem?

Once gmail added labels way back when ive kept my inbox clean using a spam gmail address. Ive given that out for more then a decade to anyone not a friend, family or acquaintance. It gets forwarded to my real gmail address to a folder called "Zunk."

This will focus on showing you only personal email. That may be what some people want, but my email is also for receipts from purchases and newsletters I deliberately subscribe to. Filtering out everything with an unsubscribe button is too blunt of an instrument for me. Sure it doesn't delete it, but... I won't know I got it. In my opinion, this is just a coy attempt to force their own mail to the inbox.

Seems to be for Gmail and Fastmail specifically, and for some reason it calls those "clients" (rather than mail service providers).

I had to create a filter for the top 200 names of a certain nationality to tame the insane levels of recruiter spam I receive for a resume I haven't released publicly in over 15 years.

This is a dumb name that will limit your user base.

I have a bunch of filters which move bulk email into a separate mailbox, so they don't hit my INBOX.

The main and most useful filter matches emails with the `List-Unsubscribe` or `List-ID` headers.

I looked through the filters in op, and my main concern is that they move emails to Archive rather than some dedicated mailbox, so you'll never see them, and can only find them by digging through emails which you've _actually_ archived.

I took a look at the list of filters before finishing the import. I'm left wondering what the point is. Gmail has quite effective spam filtering and email subscription management, making these filters almost entirely redundant. The few emails that would be caught by these filters that do currently enter my inbox are ones I actually want to see.

Also, the "allow all your own emails through", when I've not had to subscribe to your mailing list to get the download, seems a bit suspect to me. The argument of "this let's us contact you if the mail filters are updated" doesn't fly, because you shouldn't have my email address in the first place.

I’d love a SIEVE version of this.