Someone posted on X advice that really helped me clean up my inbox
Add a filter looking for the word "Unsubscribe" and automatically put them in "Promotional" category or something similar. Also apply the filter to existing emails, and let it run for a minute.
Try it now! And comment if it reduced your inbox to like 2% of what it was :)
I've commented here before that it is obvious to me that gmail makes no effort to combat spam anymore given that unsubscribe links are legally required and generally present for spam in the US and are an obvious heuristic that aren't used. I would expect basically any trained filter to pick up on it, so my assumption is that they actually intentionally have rules to allow spam.
I get emails that literally say "This is an email advertisement". These are presumably being blasted out to tons of mailboxes. How does a model not notice this?
An advertisement is only spam if it's unsolicited. If you forget to uncheck the box "yes send me promotional offers and deals" when signing up it's not spam according to that definition.
If you're making people opt-out and setting them up to "forget" to do so, then you are spamming them, but even under that definition, I'd estimate that over 99% of what I'm calling spam still qualifies. A large amount of it is from businesses I've never interacted with, so obviously unsolicited.
Isnt it against GDPR and they could get hit with large fines in Europe for every recipient?
A mail service run by an advertising company fails to filter out advertising emails? I'm shocked. Shocked!
I tried that a long time ago and the problem with it was that it produced a lot of false positives for me because I subscribe to a lot of Google Groups.
Can you make a negative condition also, X but not Y?
Of course. But the problem is that the more complicated you make your filtering logic, the harder it becomes to maintain. I was constantly discovering new exceptions to my ever-more-complicated rules, which is why I eventually gave up on that whole approach.