this post was submitted on 09 May 2026
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I have looked at paperless in the past and just asked why? I just spent a little time setting it up to see what it was about, then I spent hours configuring it and my email server creating paperless email addresses that other emails forward to! I cannot believe I have lived this long without it.

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[–] coolie4@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Sounds like OP does something similar to what I do. They setup different email inboxes or catchalls for different services, then as email comes in it gets forwarded to paperless for OCR/search maybe?

I do this with paperless-ngx, where I forward some emails to a dedicated address that paperless watches. But I do this manually with emails that have important PDFs attached.

I'm not sure what the benefit is of automatically forwarding everything to paperless. Seems like duplicating emails unnecessarily, when email clients already have search/folder functions. Also email servers have mail rules so they can be sorted based on sender/recipient/subject/etc...

[–] Reannlegge@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 month ago

Yes it is something like this, I do not have all of my emails go to paperless-ngx that would probably kill my little home lab.

I deal with a lot of financial and insurance things, having them go automatically to paperless-ngx was the plan but then I saw what I could do with automation and I spent hours setting up automation. As this is all new to me and I am dealing with some recent flooding I did not want to need to remember to start forwarding things I needed saved as pdf’s.

The automations include things that should not be forwarded to the paperless accounts, then each of the paperless accounts have rules on what to block if something slips through.