GitHub workspaces using email

In my effort of moving away form Gmail, I took the opportunity to set up my new email account in such a way that I could better organize my work on GitHub.

There’s a feature that GitHub has never had and that I’d find very useful, workspaces. I used to look at the notifications to know the things I should focus on. If you are part of multiple organizations, all those notifications show up in the same place. As a result, when I open the notifications page to plan the open source work, I end up looking at work stuff and the other way around.

Luckily, most email providers offer defining rules for emails. With rules, you can match certain emails that you receive, and define an action for them, for example archiving or deleting.

Thanks to rules I was able to have workspaces for GitHub right on my inbox. This is what I did:

1. Add an email address per workspace to your GitHub account.
2. Configure the notifications per organization and forward them to the right email account.
3. Create a folder per workspace. In my case it was “shopify”, “work”, and “tuist”.
4. Define a rule where you match the recepient with the emails above and send the email to the right folder.

Simple, isn’t it? With this little tweak I can access a notifications-free GitHub, focus on my work, and check the notifications on my email when I need to plan the work.