TL;DR. You have too many newsletter subscriptions and the best ones get lost in your inbox. Skip to Step 1 to set up a newsletter inbox in your current Gmail account. You'll be glad you did.

It's never been easier to learn online.

The internet has democratized access to writing, sharing, and publishing content. But this is a double-edged sword. Since anyone can hit publish, the tails are fatter. There's been a 10x increase in the amount of high-quality content, but the same goes for low-quality content.

We need a system to separate the signal and the noise.

Newsletters

The best way to filter for high-quality, well-written content is subscribing to email newsletters. Newsletter creators establish a one-on-one relationship with their audience, building trust and reputation with each edition. Since readers can unsubscribe with the touch of a button, newsletter content is consistently higher-quality than click-baity, SEO-driven blog posts.

These days, there is a newsletter for any topic in any niche. Tools like Substack and CovertKit make starting a newsletter easy. Anyone with specific knowledge can share what they know with the unique group of people who want to know it.

I personally subscribe to 10 to 15 newsletters. Sitting down over a cup of coffee on Sunday mornings and churning through them is one of my favorite parts of the week.

But until recently, my system for managing them was poor. I would spend too much time trying to keep track of them and subscribed to way too many. With Gmail, some of the ones I wanted to read most would get caught up in the promotions folder.

So I declared newsletter bankruptcy.

I unsubscribed from every one of them. And then I created a system in Gmail to keep track of them. Here's that system.

Overview

Disclaimer: I'm aware that there are a bunch of services that are marketing themselves as newsletter reading apps. I found them clunky and inconvenient.

You are going to set up a system that automatically recognizes the newsletters you want to read. You'll use an epic gmail hack to create a newsletter-only email. You'll create a filter for them, assign a label to them, and automatically mark them as read. This will create a "home" for your newsletters - a small tab in Gmail that you can click on knowing every week, the newsletters you want to read will be there.

The first step is declare newsletter bankruptcy. Admit it - you've probably subscribed to too many at this point. There's three or four that show up in your inbox that you've been meaning to unsubscribe to for weeks.

So unsubscribe from every one of them. You'll remember the ones you actually want to read. And you'll forget the ones that were showing up but never getting read.

Take 20 minutes and do it. This is the first step. Don't worry - you'll be resubscribing to the best ones soon.

If you use Gmail, there's a neat hack you can use to set up a "newsletter" email.

All you have to do is add "+newsletter" to the end of your email before the "@"

For example, example@dickiebush.com becomes example+newsletter@dickiebush.com. You don't have to do anything else - just use this email as the email you use to subscribe to newsletters. They'll still go into your regular inbox, for now.

Got it? Alright, let's set up a filter.

Step 3 - Creating a filter

Disclaimer: you need to be on desktop Gmail to get this set up.

Now you'll create a filter that adds a "newsletter" label to the ones you want to read.

Go to your Gmail search bar and click the arrow on the right-hand side.
Add your "+newsletter" email in the "to" field
Click "Create filter" in the bottom right-hand corner
Check the following boxes
- Skip the Inbox (Archive it)
- Always mark it as important
Check "Apply the label:" and create a new label "newsletter"
Click "Create filter" in the bottom right-hand corner.

Now let's make it easy to access this label.

On desktop, go to this url: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#settings/labels
Scroll down to "Labels" and click "show" under "Show in message list" for your "newsletter" label.

This adds the label right under your primary inbox.

Done!

Now, every email sent to your "+newsletter" email will be aggregated into this "newsletter" label inbox.

Now, start resubscribing to the ones you actually want to read every week. Make sure to use your new "+newsletter" email.

Every Sunday, you can pour a nice cup of coffee and dig into your newsletter inbox, knowing everything you want to read will be right there.

Now that you have a nicely organized newsletter inbox, you can sign up for one more.

I write a weekly newsletter with thoughts and links on growth of all kinds:

Mental growth
Physical growth
Network growth
Personal growth
Business growth
Intellectual growth
Productivity growth

Subscribe below to get the next edition!

(Bonus) Step 6 - Instapaper Autoforward

If you're an Instapaper user, you can tweak your filter to autoforward your newsletters to Instapaper. If you're not an Instapaper user, what are you doing? Learn how I use it to accelerate my learning.

Find your Instapaper forward email (https://www.instapaper.com/save/email)
Set up a contact in Google Contacts named "Instapaper" with your instapaper email address.
Go to https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/fwdandpop and click "Add a forwarding address."
Add your Instapaper forwarding address and click through.
Go to https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/filtersand find your newsletter filter
Click "edit" then click "Continue"
Check "Forward it to:" and select your Instapaper email.
Click "Update filter"