Why the fuck are you in my inbox?

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My inbox is a mess and I don’t think it’s my fault.

There’s junk coming in from every direction. Marketing I never signed up for. Newsletters from shops I bought one thing from years ago. Sign-in codes, “new sign-in from Chrome on Mac”, “your statement is ready”, “we’ve updated our privacy policy”. And the newest irritating trend: personalised, AI-generated marketing slop.

Finding emails I actually care about has become a job in itself.

I’ve given up. I switched on Microsoft’s Safe Senders feature. Anyone I haven’t approved goes straight to junk, and I go in and rescue what I want to keep. It’s the best my inbox has been in years and I think it’s roughly how email should work for everyone.

Email does two jobs

  • It’s how I talk to people and companies. Friends, family, colleagues, customers, my bank, the airline that owes me a refund.
  • It’s my filing system. Receipts, invoices, flight and hotel bookings, contracts, tax letters. Records I’ll need to find again in a month, or in five years.

If I lost my inbox tomorrow, I’d be screwed. It’s the only complete record of a decade of my life admin.

Unsubscribing puts the work on me

I’m irrationally bothered by the unsubscribe link in emails. Why do I have to unsubscribe!? And why isn’t it one click? Why do I have to get through a form that feels like it was intentionally designed to be as shit as possible?

Getting into somebody’s inbox should be a privilege. You shouldn’t need my help to stop emailing me. You should need my permission to email me to begin with.

The inbox needs a better front door

Safe Senders has helped, but my junk folder now holds real spam and legitimate email I haven’t approved yet. A new customer, an intro from a friend, a receipt from a shop I used once. They all sit next to the phishing, and I have to dig them out.

The idea is right. But the tooling sucks. Junk is a bin that I’m using as a waiting room.

Sort by who, then label by what

I want to decide who gets into my Inbox, then have the mail app file everything for me.

When someone new emails me, I choose whether their mail goes in my Inbox, skips my Inbox and gets filed, or gets blocked outright. I shouldn’t have to keep making that decision because their next email has a different subject line.

After that, AI can label the mail. A hotel receipt can be Travel and Finance at once. If one label’s wrong, I can still find it under the sender.

My dream inbox

I’d split the mail app into four places: Inbox, Screening, Senders and Labels.

The mockups below work, so have a play. Archive something, accept or block a sender, stop an airline’s promotions. They all share one mailbox, so whatever you do in one shows up in the others.

The Inbox is for conversations

The Inbox holds conversations I’m part of. Friends, family, colleagues, clients, and the odd organisation I’ve actually got something going on with, like the airline that owes me a refund.

I’d keep promotions out, even from accepted senders. That means guessing which emails are promotions, and it’ll get some wrong, so let me correct it. A wrong guess doesn’t cost much. The email is still under the airline in Senders, and it doesn’t change whether I’ve accepted them.

  • British Airways
    Refund request #4471
    We’ve passed your claim to our refunds team.
    10:02
  • Sarah Chen
    Re: Friday
    Works for me. I’ll book the table for seven.
    09:41
  • Tom, Priya4
    Board pack, final
    One change on page 6, otherwise good to go.
    08:15
  • Jacob Ellis
    Intro: Will and Dana
    Dana runs the studio I mentioned. You two should talk.
    07:52
  • Mum
    Photos from the weekend
    The good ones are at the end.
    Sun
  • Alex Moreno2
    Re: Flat contract
    Signed and attached. Keys on the 1st.
    Sat
The Inbox holds conversations and nothing else. Archive one to see how it's labelled.

Screening decides who gets in

Anyone new lands in Screening, grouped by domain so a persistent sender doesn’t crowd the queue. Each one gets the same three buttons:

  • Accept. Their mail comes to my Inbox.
  • Skip Inbox. Their mail goes straight to Senders. This is the right answer for most organisations: the bank, the energy company, the airline I flew with once.
  • Block. They’re gone, and they aren’t told.

Once I’ve answered, I never see the question again.

  • Dana Okafor110:05
    studio-mono.co
    Hello from Dana
    A person. Introduced by Jacob Ellis in your Inbox.
  • Ryan at Growthloop409:00
    growthloop.io
    Last try, Will
    Cold sales outreach. Four follow-ups in nine days, each written to you by name.
  • “J.P. Morgan Security”1Suspicious
    jpmorgan-secure-alerts.net
    Urgent: verify your account today
    Not J.P. Morgan. The domain was registered 6 days ago and fails DMARC.
  • Deliveroo2Sun
    deliveroo.co.uk
    20% off your next order
    You ordered on 3 Oct and were opted in to marketing at checkout.
  • SaaSFest 20273Sun
    saasfest.events
    Early bird tickets end Friday
    Event marketing. You’ve never been in touch with this sender.
Screening. One line on what each sender wants, and the same three choices for all of them.

Screening isn’t a new idea. HEY’s Screener asks you the first time someone emails whether you want to hear from them again, and it never tells the sender what you decided.1 BlueMail holds unfamiliar senders on a Screener page, where each one gets Accept or Block.2

I kind of like the idea of telling people that you’re rejecting them. But I can see companies abusing this.

I want it in the mail apps I use every day, with the sender history and filing to go with it.

Senders is the archive

Senders is everyone I’ve let in, grouped by domain, newest mail first. Each row shows the latest email. I can narrow it to People or Organisations, and organisations covers more than companies: HMRC, TfL, the campaign I gave money to. Let me merge domains by hand too, because my bank can’t agree on its own gTLD.

Open a sender and everything they’ve sent is together. Conversations at the top, then receipts, bookings and statements, then updates and account alerts, and promotions at the bottom. If I’ve got a refund open with an airline, it matters more than their seat sale, and it shouldn’t have to compete with it.

Promotions get one plain line each: subject and date, no preview, no pictures. The less there is to look at, the less I want to click. When I’m done with them, one button turns them off. No unsubscribe link, no form, no “we’re sorry to see you go”.

This is also where sign-in codes and activity alerts belong. I get a steady stream of them every day. A sign-in code is useful for about ten minutes and then it’s noise forever. File it under the sender, show it while it works and delete it when it expires.

Because everything from a sender already lives here, archiving doesn’t move an email anywhere. It just takes it out of the Inbox.

  • New mail goes to

    Conversations1

    • Refund request #447110:02We’ve passed your claim to our refunds team.In InboxTravelFlightFinanceRefund

    Receipts, bookings and statements2

    • E-ticket receipt: London to Sydney, 14 NovTueTravelFlightBookingFinanceReceiptTax
    • E-ticket receipt: London to Edinburgh, 2 Sep28 AugTravelFlightBookingFinanceReceiptTax

    Promotions3

    • Last chance: winter fares from £29907:00
    • Double Avios this monthFri
    • Your next adventure awaits12 Oct
Senders, newest first. British Airways is open: all their mail by type, with promotions last. Click any sender to open it. J.P. Morgan's sign-in code deletes itself after 90 seconds.

Apple Mail has a sender digest, but only inside its Transactions, Updates and Promotions categories.3 The digest is the right idea. The categories don’t work for me. One company’s mail ends up spread across three places depending on what Mail made of each message. Gmail’s tabs and Outlook’s Focused Inbox leave me hunting for mail too.

I’m using Outlook at the moment because it’s managed to annoy me the least.

Labels file everything

Then there’s finding things again.

Right now, I archive everything into one folder. One giant folder, holding every email I’ve decided I’m done with, going back years. I should organise it. I’m never going to organise it. When I need last year’s flight receipt, I search and hope.

Every email should get labelled, whether it came through my Inbox or skipped it. A flight gets Travel, Flight and Booking. A receipt gets Finance, Receipt and Tax. A letter from HMRC telling me I owe them more money gets Finance and Tax, plus whatever I happen to be calling them that day.

AI does the labelling. Labels can nest, so Flight and Hotel sit under Travel. When I want my receipts, I open Receipt. The hotel receipt belongs there and under Travel. I shouldn’t have to choose.

Labels. All mail, then every label. Click one to open its mail. Anything you archived in the figures above is marked as new.

Labels have names and symbols as well as colours. You shouldn’t need to tell red from green to find an invoice. The palette is based on Masataka Okabe and Kei Ito’s work on colour-blind-friendly design.4

AI should screen strangers

I’d also use AI to help me decide about unfamiliar senders.

Spam is getting harder to spot. I wrote about this last year: plenty of the junk that reaches me passes every authentication check, because it’s sent from real infrastructure by real companies. Now a model can write each one to me by name, so the old tells like bad spelling and “Dear Customer” are going away too.

Tell me in one line what this sender wants. Flag that “J.P. Morgan Security” is writing from a domain registered six days ago that fails DMARC. Spot that four “just following up” emails in nine days are one sales sequence. Remember that I ordered from this shop last week, so their marketing is at least expected.

Then let me decide. The AI tells me what I’m looking at, I choose, and the choice sticks.

Apple, Microsoft and Google, just do it like this

The categorised inboxes from Apple, Microsoft and Google don’t work for me. They put things in the wrong place, they don’t put them in the same wrong place twice, and they fill my day with sign-in codes and activity alerts I read once and never need again.

I want to find last year’s flight receipt without reorganising a decade of email first. Label it for me. Let me see everything from the airline in one place. And stop treating buying a ticket as an invitation to email me for the rest of my life.

If I don’t want anything to do with you, you don’t get in.

I’ll probably end up making this. If you can’t find something that works the way you want it to, make it.

Footnotes

  1. HEY, The Screener. “The first time someone emails you, you get to decide if you want to hear from them again.” ↩

  2. BlueMail, How do I review screened messages from unfamiliar senders? ↩

  3. Apple, Use categories in Mail on iCloud.com. “When you select a Transactions, Updates, or Promotions message, a digest view of messages from that sender opens.” ↩

  4. Masataka Okabe and Kei Ito, Color Universal Design: How to make figures and presentations that are friendly to colorblind people. ↩