[BeetleB]

I toyed with the idea of using a catch-all, but couldn't get around the problem of having to occasionally send mails from the address (e.g. for customer support, etc - as another commenter mentioned).

Recently I came up with another solution that I know some have used:

Stick to one email address and have a whitelist. Anything not in the whitelist is "spam" (including irritating LinkedIn emails, etc). If I get email from anyone not in the whitelist, they get sent an email with a website link asking them to confirm their identity by submitting their email address. Once they do that, they are whitelisted and all their quarantined emails show up in my inbox.

The only remaining part is constructing that whitelist. I wrote a script to go extract all the From addresses and just dumped them in there. So people who've emailed me in the past will not deal with going to the website to confirm their identity.

If I get email from an entity I no longer want to see in my inbox, I press a keystroke to remove them from the whitelist. Likewise, if I go to my quarantine folder and see an email I'd like to whitelist, it's done with a keystroke.

Been using it for less than a month, and it is quite effective so far.

[kchr]

> I toyed with the idea of using a catch-all, but couldn't get around the problem of having to occasionally send mails from the address (e.g. for customer support, etc - as another commenter mentioned).

You know, the sender header is just a text string... What stops you from putting whatever e-mail alias you registered with as sender, for those occasions?

[BeetleB]

>What stops you from putting whatever e-mail alias you registered with as sender, for those occasions?

Cognitive load. I don't want to:

1. Think about it. 2. Figure out which email address goes with which To: field. 3. Find a way to automate all this.

In the end, my solution would be less work to get rid of unwanted emails than using a catch-all. Why should I do the extra work in maintaining the system, when the sender can do the tiny amount of extra work instead? More fundamentally, why should anyone feel they have the right to just insert anything into my inbox? I should control the inbox - not them.