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I've had the same email address for more than two decades. I use it for just about everything I do. That's really convenient, but it also means my inbox is inundated with advertising, newsletters, social media updates, and other ephemera. Left unchecked, that firehose of trivial correspondence can overwhelm the useful and important stuff.
The world's two largest email providers realize this is a problem. Gmail and Outlook do some automatic mail sorting with the help of algorithms. Still, their solutions are imperfect and require constant manual intervention to train the algorithms and find the important stuff that was inadvertently demoted.
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For years, I used rules and filters based on sender addresses to move less important messages out of the inbox and into custom folders. However, setting up and managing those rules is a tedious, time-consuming process. Every time a newsletter or merchant changed their sending address or used a different subdomain, I had to modify that rule. I finally threw up my hands and said, "Enough!"
What I found instead is a simple way to automatically move those less important messages out of my inbox and into a separate folder, where I can check them when I have the time and desire. And it happens without requiring me to create and manage yet another email account.
It all works thanks to aliases, a feature that's built into most modern email solutions.
The magic of email aliases
An alias is an alternate email address that's linked to your main account. Messages addressed to an alias go to your inbox, right alongside messages sent to your primary address. But because they're not using your regular email address, you can set up your email client to perform custom actions using those aliases.
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