Does it automatically filter my email into tabs for primary, promotions, social, and updates? Cause that is the single most useful feature offered by Gmail that I have yet to find elsewhere.

I'm not talking about manually tagging, setting up, and filtering all incoming email before my inbox can self-organize. I mean automatically. Only show me the true primary items in my inbox from the jump. Everything else can wait.

In the absence of this feature my inbox becomes a torrent of incoming mail that is far harder to manage and prioritize. I keep my inbox at "zero" and I can completely understand why other people give up and let their inbox be overrun. This feature is essential for me.

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AdieuToLogic 32 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> Does it automatically filter my email into tabs for primary, promotions, social, and updates?

This is where email MUAs[0] shine. Mail user agents such as Thunderbird[1], KMail[2], Apple Mail[3], and nmh[4] (for hard-core Unix command-line aficionados) support filtering and automatic categorization to varying degrees.

All while being mail service agnostic.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_client

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Thunderbird

2 - https://apps.kde.org/kmail2/

3 - https://support.apple.com/mail

4 - https://www.nongnu.org/nmh/

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cadamsdotcom an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No it doesn’t.

But luckily you’re about 5 email filter rules away from your ideal setup.

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EchoReflection an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

yes. Fastmail can "automatically" do that, if you configure it to have those rules.

	▲	Slow_Hand 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		If I configure my rules today and then tomorrow I sign up for a new site do I have to amend my rules to also filter the new site? Because that's too much manual management. It's not a lot for a single site, yes, but x10 new sites a month it is too much. It's death by 1,000 cuts. I don't ever have to do it with Gmail, and that is a tremendous amount of time saved. It is a lifesaver.

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loloquwowndueo an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Mash that unsubscribe button my dude.

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Slow_Hand an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I unsubscribe aggressively. I keep my inbox well maintained, but that's still not the feature I'm talking about.

My work sends me several shipping notifications a day, but they are not priorities. They are emails to be reviewed later in the day. I don't want push notifications for them. I don't want them in my primary inbox. Gmail (without me telling it to) puts them in the "updates" tab.

Same for the promotional emails that come in. They go in "promotions".

If I get a 2FA email or an update on a social website they are sorted in the "social" tab without my having to set anything up.

This is extraordinarily helpful for managing my email, and it is absent in every client I have tried.

	▲	ghaff 43 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Exactly. I do unsubscribe--perhaps not as aggressively as I should--but there's a ton of stuff I may want to be aware of that I don't want polluting my primary mailbox. Sometimes I even shift them to my primary tab but, in general, I'm happy with keeping my primary to stuff that I generally do mostly care about and have a few other categories I care about to varying degrees.

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ghaff an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't want to unsubscribe from everything that I might not be interested in at the moment but may want to skim now and then to various degrees. I find gmail is very effective for that sort of thing. I find gmail's tabs pretty useful.