You might not consider improving your email inbox and account until you are already drowning in thousands of unread messages. After that, it becomes much harder to clear hundreds of emails without accidentally deleting important correspondence. However, we can provide you with several options for optimizing your email and ensuring that you do not have to be embarrassed about someone seeing how old-school it looks.
Get rid of unnecessary emails
Let’s start with getting your inbox clean and ready for a new beginning. Sadly, most email service providers cannot distinguish many of your important emails from the ones you want to remove. So, getting rid of thousands of emails becomes more about setting aside time and manually making sure you don’t remove anything important.
With the following tips, you can speed up the process:
- A fair assumption is that unread emails are most likely unimportant. In the search bar for your inbox, type in “is:unread” without quotation marks. Then, you will see only unread emails.
- In your Gmail settings, you can also increase the number of messages seen on a page. By default, it is 50; you can increase this number to 100.
- Then click the “Select” button at the top of your inbox and remove all messages.
While this is not the most seamless approach, it can help you quickly reduce the number of messages.
Use separate email accounts
Having separate email accounts for different purposes saves a lot of time. For example, your main account should include all your important correspondence. Another can be dedicated to marketing letters, and the third can be for joining new services or earning money online (such as contacting freelancing clients).
You can also make money from your phone through email. Some services pay you to read emails, which can support engagement or simply provide feedback on how marketing emails grab your attention. Some services require you to use an email account, but others, such as JumpTask, let you read emails through their own service. Thus, you don’t need to use your own inbox.
Don’t treat your inbox as storage
You don’t leave physical letters in your home without a reason: the same should apply to your inbox. Make it a habit to check new emails daily, and once you read them, decide their fate. You might mark them with a label or transfer them to a folder. In most cases, they will end up in the bin.
Unsubscribe without guilt
Unsubscribing might seem uncomfortable, but don’t allow emails you never read to continue flooding your inbox. Each email should contain a button that you can use to unsubscribe from their mailing list. You can also use a dedicated unsubscribe app that helps automate this process.
Besides limiting incoming emails, these services also automatically delete marketing messages older than 30 days. This type of email likely takes up the most storage in your inbox. Consider options like Clean Email, Leave Me Alone, or Mailstorm, depending on the additional features you need.
Learn email provider shortcuts and search operators
You will be surprised how quickly you can filter emails using your inbox search. For example, you can quickly find emails containing attachments or from specific senders. Also, a few keystrokes can open a new email window or perform another task. It is crucial to learn these shortcuts and operators to manage your inbox effectively.
Using labels to mark emails
A great way to optimize your inbox is to start using labels. You can create personalized labels to mark your emails. This option could differ based on the email service provider. Most popular platforms offer this, and classifying your messages can help you find them faster.
You can also create folders to tidy up your inbox, but labels work similarly. Instead of manually applying labels, you can automate this with filters that apply your criteria and mark messages automatically.
Final thoughts
Having at least a few email addresses is a necessity nowadays. However, people tend to neglect their inboxes until the number of unread emails becomes astonishing. So we recommend setting aside time to clear it and build a system that keeps things organized going forward. Then, you won’t be embarrassed to open your inbox in front of someone and actually find the messages you wish to keep.