HEY Proton Mail

For the past years I had connected my domain to privateemail. It’s build on top of open-xchange and does the job. The user interface sucks big time and the mobile mail app seems to be taken out of the android play store.

The best feature from privateemail is sieve email filtering. You can write your own filtering rules, and as a developer it’s fun to play with. I ended up writing rules to copy the multi inbox format from Gmail and pushed email into the social, updates, forums and promotions categories. The notifications in those categories were silenced, reducing the noise they create.

I tried different ways to utilize privateemail, different clients, enabling the exchange feature (which didn’t work that good), but at the end it became more a forwarding and smtp service to my gmail account.

Switching to Proton Mail

I already had a Proton Mail account but haven’t been using it for a long time. I never made the switch before, mainly because the mobile client does not support conversation view (the web client does). The renewal for privateemail was around the corner and I decided to let the subscription run out and switch to Proton Mail entirely, including connecting my custom domain to it.

This is where the fun starts because Proton Mail supports sieve filtering. First thing I did was copying the Gmail multi inbox categories and wrote the filters for it. I noticed the social and forums categories were not used that much. Most emails you get are notifications and promotions, at least in my case.

Searching on the web I found some info about the HEY workflow. So I digged a bit deeper into that.

The HEY Workflow

HEY has a few folders: Inbox, The feed, Paper trail, and Screening. I’m not sure if the last one is a real folder but I use it in Proton Mail.

Inbox

In HEY it’s called the Imbox, and yes, the typo is intended. This is your normal inbox where the real important mail comes in. I think that is why they called it like that.

The feed

This is your newsfeed for newsletters. Emails are added with a read flag, meaning that you do not get notifications or even see the counter. You can read those whenever you feel like it. Without the new email counter this folder is not messing with your workflow.

Paper trail

This is the place for receipts, confirmations, and other transactional emails. You don’t need to read all of them, but can if you want.

Screening

This is the folder where email from unscreened email addresses are coming in. The idea behind the HEY workflow is that AI sucks. It is not smart enough (yet) to categorize email good enough. Their philosophy is that HI (Human Intelligence) can do a better job. So every new from address goes into here once and you decide what kind of email it is, and you pick one of the categories form above. HEY remembers this for you and will do this automatically for you next time.

This workflow sparked my interest and you can even mimic it with sieve filtering.

HEY Screening Sieve Filter

require ["include", "environment", "variables", "relational", "comparator-i;ascii-numeric", "spamtest", "extlists", "fileinto", "imap4flags"];

# Do not run this script on spam messages
if allof (
    environment :matches "vnd.proton.spam-threshold" "*",
    spamtest :value "ge" :comparator "i;ascii-numeric" "${1}"
) {
    return;
}

# Ignore messages sent by myself: they will be stored in `Sent`
if header :list "from" ":addrbook:myself"
{
    #fileinto "sent";
    return;
}

# The real important emails go directly to the Inbox
if header :list "from" ":addrbook:personal?label=InboxGroup" {
    fileinto "Inbox";
}

# Your newsfeed for newsletters
elsif anyof (
    header :list "from" ":addrbook:personal?label=TheFeedGroup",
    address :matches "from" [
        "newsletter@example.com",
        "newsletter-two@example.com"
    ],
    exists "list-unsubscribe",
    exists "x-campaign",
    exists "x-campaignid",
    exists "x-feedback-id",
    exists "x-maillist-guid",
    exists "x-maillist-id",
    exists "x-feedback-id",
    exists "x-rpcampaign",
    exists "x-unsubscribe-web"
) {
    #addflag "\\\\Seen";
    fileinto "The feed";
}

# The place for receipts, confirmations, and other transactional emails
elsif anyof (
    header :list "from" ":addrbook:personal?label=PaperTrailGroup",
    address :matches "to" [
        "prefix+*@my-domain.com"
    ],
    address :matches "from" [
        "service@paypal.de"
    ]
) {
    fileinto "Paper trail";
}

# File other emails for screening
else {
    fileinto "Screening";
}

I don’t mark emails as seen in The Feed, so that I can easy see which newsletters I read or not. Since they are in a separate folder they don’t interfere with the important emails in your inbox. Every few days I will check that folder and see if there are unread newsletters.

Also the headers are scanned for an unsubscribe mail as it usually indicates a newsletter.

For the paper trail, an address list group is used to whitelist senders. This can also be automated in case you use something like subaddressing (address :matches "to"…), or you can explicitly add from emails in the filter address :matches "from"....

Everything that is not caught by then will end up in the Screening folder. There you can scan the incoming emails and add them to on of the methods above.

If you have at least a plus subscription for Proton Mail, you can add your own custom domain. I have set it up in such way that I have a few mailboxes defined.

Keep spam under control

I prefer to have a unique email address for each site. You could use subaddressing like prefix+sdf3g5@my-domain.com, or a catch-all address. In case of a catch-all address, you can create unique address for each website, e.g. websitename.sdf3g5@my-domain.com, where the second part is a random string of a few characters. A subaddress can be tracked, or so they say. The prefix part would always be the same. The second solution cannot be tracked, because it could be used by multiple persons, e.g. duck.com or firefox relay.

You still want to keep track of all the email addresses you created and used, in case a site got hacked and that email address is in the open. You can blacklist the to address.

Another way is to whitelist only the emails you used. In that case add them to your sieve filters. I prefer the whitelisting so you don’t wake up in the morning and find out that someone was in a funny mood and sent you emails to 700 different address on your domain which got caught by the catch-all address.

This sound like a lot of work, and it is. But there are tools like simplelogin, which can generate these email addresses for you and have a dashboard where you can manage it.

Bonus Suspicious Filter

You can do a lot more with sieve filters. For example you can tag all emails which are unsecure (not sent with encryption), or fail dkim or spf.

require ["include", "fileinto"];

# Mark emails that failed basic anti-spoofing or did not use tls
if anyof(
  header :contains "Authentication-Results" ["dkim=fail", "spf=fail", "spf=none"],
  header :is "x-pm-transfer-encryption" "none"
) {
  fileinto "Suspicious";
}

And there you have it. An email service which respects your privacy and, with the help of sieve filters, it allows you to take control of your inbox and create less noise.