I recently switched (mostly) from gmail and realized what insidious lock-in mechanisms the "unlimited inbox" and "inbox categories" really are. I hadn't been gi

I recently switched (mostly) from gmail and realized what insidious lock-in mechanisms the "unlimited inbox" and "inbox categories" really are. I hadn't been giving it much thought, but I've gone well over a decade just casually archiving everything, on the presumption that I can always find anything important I might need to reference by searching for it down the line. And I'd just been ignoring those junkier "category" tabs for months on end, presuming I can always go sort through them later to find those handful of actually-important messages that end up in there. Maybe this is just my personal organizational problem, but it was like a waking nightmare when I really started to look with fresh eyes at how unstructured my email management strategy had become with the tools gmail gives you. It took me weeks of nights and weekends to sort this all out (finding messages I actually want to save, identifying senders I actually want manually sorted to other folders, unsubscribing from lists I've been ignoring for years because they were conveniently out of site in "promotions") to a point where I felt ready to migrate to a more traditional mailbox setup. I can easily imagine many people seeing how daunting this task is and just deciding to stick with gmail.