January 30, 2026
Inbox hack ignites email civil war
Email experiments: filtering out external images
Simple inbox trick exposes robot mail—and sparks a feud
TLDR: One simple filter that shunts image-loading emails into an “Automated” folder is helping people spot robot newsletters from real human messages. Commenters applauded the privacy win, argued over whether email is even worth saving, and traded hacks from emoji-spotting to self-hosted alias revenge.
A one-line email hack just lit up the internet: filter any message that loads images from the web straight into an “Automated” folder, leaving your main inbox for real human mail. The author says it’s “shockingly effective,” and the crowd went wild—then immediately split into camps. Team Privacy cheered the idea as a tracker-pixel smackdown, with folks pointing to Gmail’s image blocking as a must-use. Team Pragmatic piled on more hacks: one user tags any subject with emoji as suspicious sales bait, another nukes anything with “unsubscribe” from sight. The mood? “Robots, get out of my inbox.”
But then came the chaos. One commenter detonated the room with, “Who even uses email anymore?” and suddenly it’s Email Boomers vs. Slack Zoomers. Some claim family chats and office gossip already live on iMessage, Teams, and Slack; others fire back that receipts, banks, and shipping updates still demand email—and this rule finally separates Aunt Linda’s photos from corporate logos. Meanwhile, the self-hosting warriors charged in: run your own server, mint aliases for every site, and “name and shame” spammers like a vigilante superhero.
Between emoji witch-hunts, “unsubscribe” purges, and DIY mail fortresses, the verdict is clear: inbox peace is possible—but the culture war over email is just heating up.
Key Points
- •The author identifies externally loaded HTML images as a proxy for automated emails and newsletters.
- •They implement a Sieve rule using a regex to detect <img> tags with HTTPS sources and file such emails into an ‘Automated’ folder.
- •Mail clients often block external images by default due to privacy concerns and tracking by remote servers.
- •Initial testing over about a day shows the filter is effective, with minimal false positives/negatives noted.
- •Planned refinement includes adding exceptions for messages from contacts to avoid misclassification.