February 2025 - Mozilla Fixes My Email

I've started losing emails. Sometimes I find them again, but the utility of Email is somewhat lost on me when I can't quickly find emails from my archives. I've already had a rudimentary archiving system set up, for a while now, but I don't really want to do it by hand, especially not when I get upward of ten Emails a day.

I've unfortunately tied most things to a googlemail account, which means that I get to deal with the Big-Tech classic: Shit does not work.

Google purports to have filters, but I find that when google does not have enough data on you, it likes to just straight-up misbehave. Because my email inbox has a case of the chaos gremlins, I had to sadly notice that none of the google filtering work, even when actively debugged by sending myself emails that should be filtered out automatically. Because I'm too lazy to move my entire email that most of my contacts already know to another account, and I'm not getting rid of it anyway on account of having an android phone, I found a workaround by using Thunderbird.

Thunderbird is made by the same people that make the firefox browser, which is also the browser I use primarily. It does not track you without your consent, nor does it eat RAM like I eat cake (you'll just have to trust me on this analogy), and more importantly, I can once again add an application to every single one of my devices, because it does what it's meant to.

Thunderbird has almost the exact same interface for setting up filters as gmail has, but those filters happen to work on first try, and there's nothing that google can do against that. I first implemented filters to the mail that I wanted to keep but was unlikely to realistically ever need again into the folders. Those are newsletters, and the like, which I sometimes look into when I have entirely too much time on my hand, but are not as important as personal contacts and planning threads with those that prefer to communicate by email, as well as emails that are meant to replace all the legal paperwork that comes with being an adult, apparently.

Once I found the filter interface on Thunderbird, and the ability to export an account configuration, my inbox was clean within less than an hour, a far cry from the frankly embarrassing showing that google had to offer. All my other accounts are more or less decoys, that exist for one specific thing, so I don't need to filter those to the extent that my personal one needs to be filtered, which means that this month's project could have been done in one sitting, if the advertised solution had functioned, but this way is fine for me as well, as it lets me banish the gmail app into the depths of the "Never Used" apps category on my phone.

The fact that thunderbird does not have filters on mobile yet is slightly unfortunate, but I don't really rely on my phone to do the syncing for me either way, so while I'd prefer a full suite of features on all devices, I can live with opening my mail on my computer every other day, seeing as I tend to do most emailing from there anyway.