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I get a lot of daily deals emails, from Groupon, to LivingSocial, to Google Deals, to a bunch of very specific ones like Newegg's shell shocker deals, and all of that is on top of regular daily marketing from sites like TigerDirect and Newegg.

I have toyed with the idea of just unsubscribing from everything, but I don't want to cut out the daily deals completely. I've found some really great stuff through these ads; that happens about once a month. Is there some easy way to keep track of all this? Pehaps some app that shows me all the deals the big names are offering at one?

I do have all of these emails being sent into a special label in Gmail, but that doesn't stop me from having to read them every day to see if there is anything good?

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How do you define "something good"? – Jeanne Boyarsky♦ Aug 7 '12 at 2:01
Uh... something that I want to buy? I mean that putting them in their own label doesn't help with the fact that I have to still read them. I want to streamline the process. – Nick Anderegg Aug 7 '12 at 2:08
I think that what @Jeanne is getting at is that unless you can quantify "something good" into something you can turn into a rule, it's going to be difficult. What is something you want to buy? Right now, I've got a rule set up looking for 32GB MiniSD cards. I still have to look at prices, but at least I only have to cull through one or two emails a week rather than five every day. Some of these companies might have an RSS feed as an alternative to emails...use an RSS aggregator, perhaps? – dwwilson66 Aug 7 '12 at 12:17
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Is the value of these 'once a month' deals you are taking advantage of greater than the time you are spending looking at all the emails? If not, you would be better off just unsubscribing from the lot. – Burhan Ali Aug 9 '12 at 22:44

2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

Since you want to peruse these deal e-mails, you'll want to start filtering ones that you're pretty sure you won't have interest in. No one is interested in purchasing every kind of product.

Let's say that you have no interest in dresses. You can filter out deal e-mails that have "dress*" in the subject line, body, whatever.

I do this in Mozilla Thunderbird.

Set up the filter once, and increase your productivity incrementally from then on.

This is not a fast process, but it's one that you can control pretty well, and the training does get better.

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up vote 0 down vote

You cut drop most of those and subscribe to http://yipit.com/ instead. That's their business model exactly, though I don't think they cover Newegg. And, theoretically, you can even specify interests and geographic locations and have only those deals show up (have to login for that).

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Looks nice, but not very useful for those of us outside of the US though. – Alex Florescu Aug 13 '12 at 18:48
The original questions mentioned specials that I believe are only available in USA and Canada. Yipit covers those locations as well. I don't know what the special deals are for other parts of the world. – Alexandre Rafalovitch Aug 14 '12 at 4:52

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