I’ve been suffering from a case of email overload. As of publishing this post I have 14 emails. About three weeks ago I had over 3,400 emails dating back to September 12, 2015. I’m not sure why, maybe the mix of being busy with work and school, but I stopped checking my emails regularly. I was going through my most recent 50 or so and read or delete, and I’d check my inbox for work, but other than that I wasn’t reading emails.
Email Overload: How to take back control of your inbox.
I’ll admit that dealing with cleaning out my email became a little overwhelming, especially because I get at least a couple hundred emails a day. I also have multiple email accounts, which can be a help sometimes and other times just contribute to the stress of having too many emails.
How did I finally deal with my over 3000 emails and get back to a manageable inbox? First, I used a site called Unroll.me and I logged it to my 2 main email inboxes, which are my personal Gmail and blog Gmail. Last year my personal Gmail was all I used when I decided to move over from Yahoo!, so I was getting a ton of emails.
When I started my blog I decided that any blog related emails or emails related to business, blogging, design, etc. should go to my blog email and leave my personal email for personal related information and emails from news sources like Buzzed, the Skimm, Levo League and other digest type emails. I began to resubscribe with my blog email, but I forgot to unsubscribe from many of the email subscriptions in my personal email. That meant I was getting a ton of duplicate emails.
I went through the list of subscriptions and chose which ones to unsubscribe from. I love how all the subscriptions are in alphabetical order.
While Unroll.me will stop future emails, it doesn’t erase the old emails. To deal with this I went through my emails and found subscriptions I wanted to end or had ended and would copy the email address that sent the emails and I would search for them on my iPhone and then delete past emails, most unread and some that I had read. It still took my a few days to really clear out the old emails.
I use the Apple Mail app to manage my emails because I have many different emails and use Yahoo! and Gmail as well as another lesser known email provider through my job. Having the ability to have all my emails in one or to just see one inbox is really nice. This made is much easier when I wasn’t checking my emails to just look at my school inbox or work inbox and not miss important emails.
Everyone talks about Inbox Zero, but that isn’t my goal. My goal is to get past email overload, and to do this I’ll start by managing my emails and cut back on the number of emails I receive.
How do you manage your emails and keep your inbox clean?