Lately, I've seen many people talk about how overwhelming their email inboxes have become. Some have over 100K unread emails, while others have around 21K.

While my inbox is no clean slate, it's better off because of an automatic filtering rule I have set up in Gmail.

Most emails in my inbox are from banks, e-commerce websites and other transactional emails that arrive in high volume each day.

I don't need to review them every day, but keeping them as records helps me find order details or transaction information later.

Inspired by Hey's Paper Trail mailbox, I've created a label called Papertrail, which collects all these transactional emails that hit my inbox every day.

To make this process automatic, I've set up filtering rules, which work like this:

Gather all emails from one or more senders by setting a catch-all rule like this:

Then, mark all matching emails as read, archive them, and tag them with a Papertrail label for future reference:

If you already have plenty of these emails crowding your inbox, you can check the Also apply filter to matching conversations at the end to run the filter on existing emails and sort them accordingly.

You'll need to do this for every high-volume sender at the start, but once your filter list grows, your inbox will become quieter and more manageable.

Give it a try if your email inbox is bursting with receipts, alerts and other non-urgent emails.

Now, speaking of receipts, app subscriptions are getting out of hand these days.

Almost every app today requires a subscription fee to use advanced features or have higher usage limits. And paying for tens of different app subscriptions is unsustainable.

To help you reduce some of that financial strain, I've partnered with Setapp to bring their app bundle, which allows you to pay a single subscription fee to access more than 250 helpful apps.

Before you move on to the rest of this newsletter issue, here are a few words about: