I’ll leave directions here for when a sudden burst of motivation blindsides you.
- Sort by sender
- Unsubscribe from sender
- Delete everything from that sender
- Repeat until clean
This is actually useful, thank you!
Mark all as read, transfer all to archive
And if something really important gets caught in that, don’t worry, they’ll e-mail again. If they don’t, it’s clearly not that important.
Unsubscribing to shit you don’t care about, using the search on the desktop client to be able to select 100s of emails and delete them at a time, and automatic filters are your friend.
And like someone else said, if it’s over like a month old and unread, chuck it in an “archive” folder and mark all as read. They’ll still be there if you absolutely need them, but won’t be cluttering stuff up.
Don’t try to manage it from the phone app, it’s a pain in the ass.
Caveat: I say all this with even more unread than your picture, and having not done any cleanup of my inboxes (besides setting filters on my work one) in years. I just remember what did work for me the last time I was on top of my inbox for a few years in college.
My PB
Whoa, I thought I couldn’t be bested.
If we had a triathlon that included open browser tabs and old friends whose messages I haven’t responded to, I think I have a good chance of medaling.
Hey, hey you - you don’t owe an email anything. Just leave it unread.
Feeling inspired to go unsubscribe from a bunch of junk mail and clean up old mail? Go for it.
But you shouldn’t waste a second of your time feeling obligated to deal with emails sent largely by automated marketing campaigns.
At work I spend time to organize my inbox, its a necessity, on my personal email, I get security alerts & banking into separate folders, that’s about it, I don’t waste a moments thought on the unread count.
Recently I set up a new personal email address with a custom domain for important shit and I gave it to close friends and family. I keep my free email addresses for shit like newsletters, non critical logins etc. That new email maybe gets one email a day so it’s very easy to maintain inbox zero. But the other email addresses I can’t be bothered to clean.
Also having an email with a custom domain makes it very easy to migrate to another email provider if I ever need to. Since I can migrate the address with me.
Mine forces me to keep it at zero all the time.
I’ve been working on cleaning mine out. I’ve got it from 13k down to 2k, which feels good, but I still have a ways to go.
Got a custom icon set on my phone, no big red number/notifcation to disturb my day!
What? How? Just unsubscribe from shit you don’t want. Bin it all then tackle each mail as it lands.
Damn, I cannot stand an unread notification.
Yeah, another “just do something”, as if I’m not telling it myself enough.
Yeah, I’ll just commit myself to doing something now, instead of putting it off until I forget about it.
🫠
