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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.

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!"