Most notification systems do not have an information problem. They have a presentation problem. The email system had already done the hard work. In an earlier post, I described the scoring pipeline that separates mail needing an immediate alert from messages that can wait for the evening summary or a later review. More recently, I wrote about removing recurring junk at the source, rather than merely teaching the filter to tolerate it. ...
Email junk does not arrive as one dramatic flood. It accumulates quietly. A shop you bought from once starts sending three promotions a week. A travel site mistakes one booking search for lifelong intent. A restaurant app decides you need personalised recommendations forever. None of these messages are individually offensive. That is why they survive. But the result is stupid: an inbox full of tiny claims on attention. So I asked Closp to audit the last month of Gmail and find the recurring junk worth unsubscribing from. ...
Email overload is a modern disease. Hundreds of emails a day, most of them noise. Newsletters you forgot you subscribed to. Marketing emails disguised as personal messages. Bank statements. Gas bills. The occasional important email buried in the flood. I tried fixing this with a simple ignore list. It didn’t scale. This is the story of how I built a multi-layer email filtering system that replaced hardcoded bash patterns with intelligent scoring, security scanning, and adaptive learning. ...