How Do You Manage Your Email?

Help! How Do You Manage Your Email?

March 24, 2011

You've shared email management tips before, but I think I need a bit of an intervention. My Gmail inbox is currently a mess of nearly 30,000 message, 12,129 of which are unread. While I do diligently file away important messages and those I want to save, I do rely a little too heavily on Gmail's search function (especially now that I know you can create customized searches).

My work email is filtered, color coded, labeled, filed, and under control, but my personal inbox is a disaster. Can you help? Please share your best email management tips in the comments below!

Source: Thinkstock

Geek Out Email Management

4 Comments

LittleMissSunshine22 2 years

I like Frenched delete or archive and replay to emails everyday, so the next day in my inbox are only new and unread emails.. So my advice is delete delete delete. Do 100 emails everyday and the day with your clean inbox will come :) just don't give up. you can also try email game - emailgame.baydin.com maybe that will help...

2 years

Most of my mail I sort into thematic folders (I guess, gmail users would use labels for that;)) like job, shopping, and many others, still, in my inbox I currently have more than 10800 emails. And I also rely heavily on my ability to always reference to them, search through them. But I also know, that I hardly ever need to return to "really old" emails. So, every now and then I just move all my mails, say, up to 2009 in a suitably named folder. My inbox is small again and I can enjoy fast searches once again. (as a side note - yes, I still prefer to have all my mail locally on my personal mail-server, running Linux, use procmail to sort mailing list posts immediately into various folders and use pine (no, not even alpine;)) to read them).

Frenched 2 years

It's a weird quirk I have but, I LOVE deleting e-mail out of my Inbox every day. It makes me feel like I'm clearing my mind, HAHA. Silly, I know. Sometimes even I get backed up, though. I just pretty much go through everything I get in my personal e-mail, read it immediately (or save it as 'Unread' for future reference) and then I 'Select All' and only save the e-mails that I am going to store in a Folder. It's a daily habit that really has helped to keep my personal e-mail uncluttered for years.

onelovemeg 2 years

Check out my boyfriends blog, he recently did a post on managing email and the joys of an empty inbox. I know I read it and did a little spring cleaning myself. http://almostbohemian.com/2011/03/spring-clean-that-inbox/ Hope this helps! -Meg www.onelovemeg.com

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4 Comments