I wonder what’s the latest state of play for email newsletters. I have about 25 email subscriptions, and even though I eventually glance over them, I could benefit from them not being in my inbox. I’ve tried many different things however still challenged to make any solution for me. My ideal state is to have email newsletters in a separate app, that I can get to during evenings/weekends.
This is what I tried:
Sanebox: relatively expensive. Removes newsletters from inbox, however I find myself never actually finding time to get to those Sanebox folder
Gmail rules: tedious to setup, and does not work for all subscriptions for some reason. And it creates the same challenge. Rules remove newsletters (most of them) out of inbox sight (this is good) but having those newsletters in folders meaning I never get to read them.
DEVONThink: tried at one point however it takes ages to load inbox, and a lot of manual work on a daily basis. Newsletters are not worth that much efforts so I gave up on this method.
Reader app: trying this now together with Gmail rules where I move a newsletter out of inbox, and also forward to Reader’s specific email. Sounds promising however I do not seem to be able to categorise in Reader, it is one long feed.
I am curious to learn what tools/workflows you are using for email newsletters?
It could be helpful to know, what Mail-App (and on which system) you are using.
From my side, I eliminated all Mails I do not want to receive with SpamSieve.
Everything else is sorted by rules on my Mail App on the 24/7 Mac.
The Readwise Reader (and many others) also have an E-Mail-Adress where you could forward Mails to, to read it later within the Reader.
This also could be achieved automatically by an Mail-Rule.
I use Feedbin. It’s paid but I use it for so much RSS stuff that it’s like a free extra for newsletters. Helpfully it let’s you click into a confirmation email, which some services require before sending you a newsletter. Not everywhere will do that.
Formatting is generally good too, which is another issue with some methods I tried.
I use FastMail’s server-side rules. I setup the rules based on content in the newsletters’ mail headers, e.g. from, reply address, etc. For some news letters I have a special Fastmail alias email I use and I simply look for the ‘to’ address. On match, all go to a folder in the FastMail inbox. I’m guessing you can do same with Gmail.
The others match multiple addresses and either deletes them, stars them, or applies other labels. Each rule can apply to multiple addresses. Just separate them with OR. I have one with 30 addresses.
I think three of your four attempts essentially ended with, “then I don’t go look at them.”
I’ve concluded I just don’t have that much interest in reading most newsletters most of the time. That’s ok – they’re there when I want them, at least.
For the ones I really need to read (eg for work), I try to find a routine approach, to make it part of my day or week. Then it matters a lot less exactly where they end up (as long as it isn’t my inbox!).
One thing you might try is putting your newsletters in two places (or using two tags) and only committing to read one of them regularly. Every time you find something tedious in the regular reading area, move it to the second area. Check the second area as little as you care to. This is essentially my setup.
I used to sort them into folders but like the OP, that made me forget they exist. Now I use mail rules to forward them to Feedly, my RSS reader. So they show up there like any other RSS feed and I can decide to read them or not but they don’t intrude on my mailbox.
The only issue is that some mail filters seem not to get triggered at times even though the trigger criterion seems to be perfectly matched.
Newsletters should have an unsubscribe link so you can use that in a rule ie.
if body contains “unsubscribe” move to…
You can also look at mail headers on arrival, newsletters have to have some distinct mail header tags, you can do this either server side or in the mail app if it supports it.
Third option use a dedicated email alias, for example gmail allows yourmailaddresss+newslettername@gmail.com then effectively ignores the part after the plus sign, then again set a rule/filter.
Fourth Use a masked email , both Apple and Fastmail allow randomly created (by the system) addresses which just divert to your account. Then just filters and rules again.
You should be very careful with this!
Every “Newsletter” you receive without you asked the sender for this, shouldn’t be unsubscribed via a link or so!
Beside other reasons for that, with every unsubscribe attempt you do on a Mail like that, you confirm your Mail-Adress to the sender, and this increases the “Value” of your Adress by a factor 100.000 (or more!)
I use a combination of the aforementioned rules server-side to sort them into a “Lists folder”. Specifically if the body contains the word “unsubscribe” or it is from one of the following e-mail addresses.
The extra bit is that I don’t mark them as read in this rule. So every now and then when the unread count on that folder creeps up I go in and scan through them, which marks them as read so I know where I’m “up to” in that folder.
Not sure if you are being obtuse or genuinely not understanding.
Newsletters must contain an unsubscribe link, usually containing the word “unsubscribe”. As the original poster was asking for a way to differentiate them from regular inbox mail, I and others made suggestions one of which was to detect the word “unsubscribe “ in the email body and then have a rule to move it to a “read later folder “ or whatever you want. To call it.
No one suggested or mentioned unsubscribing.
Just as an aside if. You go the masked email route and set up one per newsletter sign up even if you did click the unsubscribe the masked (read temporary) email address is useless to spammers as you simply delete it.
I use rules in Apple Mail to put various categories of messages into folders usually based on topic. As example I have an email folder called Vendors that get the various sales notices from vendors I regularly use. I have some others for activities I’m involved in.
I subscribe to newsletters in Home - Omnivore which works pretty well; I scan through them when I have some downtime instead of social media/YouTube. It’s free.
Omnivore gives you one or more email addresses and simplifies the content for reading. You can view incoming emails so you can confirm subscription. The iOS app will read out loud.
For a couple of newsletters I forward from my GMail account to Omnivore and automatically archive.
The downside is it’s not possible to tag according to the inbound email address which would be useful to automatically categorise.
