There are few things as soul-sapping as opening your inbox only to discover it has become a digital landfill. Promotional fluff, half-hearted newsletters, and subject lines shouting “LAST CHANCE!” - which, oddly, seem to arrive every week. It’s like being heckled by marketers every time you check for a genuine message.
Enter unfuck.email - a gloriously blunt, open-source project whose sole mission is, well, in the name. It provides pre-cooked filters you can drop straight into Fastmail (or Gmail, if you must, although...) that automatically catch the worst offenders: “Act Now!”, “Congratulations!”, “Special Offer!” and all the other linguistic red flags that should never darken your inbox in the first place.
What I love about using unfuck.email with Fastmail is how cleanly it slots in. Fastmail’s filtering system is already excellent - surgical, even - but sitting down and hand-crafting hundreds of rules is, let’s be honest, about as appealing as alphabetising the frozen peas in your freezer. Unfuck.email just gives you a ready-made list. Import, enable, done. Like handing your butler a blacklist of who’s never allowed to call again.
The result? Inbox Zero feels less like inner peace and more like finally doing the dishes - not glamorous, but suddenly the kitchen’s yours again. Instead of constantly wading through marketing noise, I’m left with an inbox that contains only what’s actionable, personal, or at least vaguely interesting. All the “miracle offers” and “exclusive savings” are still there if I ever fancy browsing them (spoiler: I rarely, if ever, do), but tucked safely out of sight in a folder where they can’t peck at my attention.
It’s small, simple, and open-source - three things the modern web desperately needs more of. And it makes Fastmail, already one of the sanest email services, feel even more like the inbox I wish everyone had: polite, uncluttered, refreshingly civilised.
So yes, I’ve officially unf-well, tidied-my email. And it’s wonderful to be reminded the internet can be a little kinder when you ask it to be.