Tackling My Inbox: How I Used Python to Filter Spam and Prioritize Emails

Photo by Tudor Baciu on Unsplash

Let’s be real: my inbox was a disaster zone. Picture this — thousands of unread emails, a jumble of spam, newsletters I never subscribed to (or did I?), and amidst this chaos, those few precious work emails that actually needed my attention. It was like finding a needle in a haystack, except the haystack was digital and just as irritating.

So, what’s a tech-savvy individual (with a flair for dramatics) to do? I turned to Python, my go-to solution for life’s problems that are slightly (or not so slightly) out of my control. Python, with its simplicity and powerful libraries, seemed like the perfect ally in my quest for inbox sanity.

The Game Plan

The plan was simple: use Python to automate filtering out spam and prioritize the rest. Sounds easy, right? Well, the journey was filled with humorous mishaps, unexpected learning curves, and a surprising amount of emotional attachment to emails I had forgotten about.

Step 1: Identifying Spam

First up, identifying spam. I used the SpamAssassin public corpus as my dataset, training a machine learning model to recognize what I definitely didn’t want to see. Here’s a snippet of how I got started:

from sklearn.model_selection import…