For me, it's been the single greatest boost to email productivity. It works great 99%+ of the time for me where I only keep any eye on Updates and Primary, and maybe once a week clear out the Promotions tab. Forums and Social I can usually clear out without even looking.
Interesting how people can have such different experiences.
Classical AI (i.e. manually-constructed email rules) is much better for this kind of thing, in my experience. You don't get spurious false positives; you can predict every false positive in your head before you even get the email, and if you want you can even add an extra rule to prevent it from happening in the first place!
“Unknown / trusted / spam senders” lists are a basic implementation of this concept.
This is why Inbox's Bundles feature was amazing. User-defined rules, emails either show up live or in digest form throughout the day, shown in your (one) inbox, not in some panel where secondary "labels" or "folders" are relegated to. Collapsed by default, but expandable.
Gmail thought that adding Snooze was enough to get feature parity and kill Inbox, but Bundles were by far the feature keeping me on Inbox.
I, for one, don't use that feature because I use two email addresses. People who know me personally only know one of them, and I use the other for registrations and subscriptions.
This has also had the greatest effect for me. If you don't share your main email with sketchy reselling parties, it remains surprising clean. And this on a 10 year old+ account.
sort of this: i treated the Promotions tab as a "unsubscribe from these mailing lists ASAP" tab as soon as the category feature came out
i get so few of them now i removed all those extra tabs and filters a year ago, but it was pretty useful to get my total inbox as clean as it is now :)
Right, exactly. I want my "promotions" to land square one in my inbox, because then I'm going to deal with them right then and there. Unsubscribe comes first. A filter comes next, if they keep sending.
I feel guilty using it the first go. I figure I will click on their unsubscribe link first. And then I will click the report spam button if they continue to send me email
Unfortunately, all I'm probably doing is just confirming my email address to generate future "mailing list" subscriptions.
I get quite a bit of emails that are not completely spam, but by no means urgent to see. The filtering has been great to let me focus on things I need to see immediately, without having to scroll through 50 different promotional things