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I was drowning in email too not long ago, and decided I was tired of it. The proposed solution in this article of having your mail client threaten you with an u
by claar 12y ago
I was drowning in email too not long ago, and decided I was tired of it. The proposed solution in this article of having your mail client threaten you with an ultimatum doesn't seem well thought out.
First, I unsubscribed to absolutely anything with a legitimate unsubscribe link, instead of archiving/deleting it daily/weekly as I had before. Over time, this made a dramatic difference in the amount of email I received each day.
Second, though barely needed after #1, I use a couple of filters to get rid of things I can't unsubscribe to for various reasons.
I now keep a near-zero-inbox, and find email to be much less of a burden to manage.
- mkohlmyr 12y agoI too did exactly this around 5 weeks ago for my personal email address, and maintain an inbox of less than 5 emails at any given time. I spent almost 4 hours moving old read and unread emails into a small set of folders en masse (thousands of emails). I unsubscribed or set up folder filters for all mailing lists. I went from receiving ~20 emails per day to ~3-4 (in my main inbox). Once you get rid of the nonsense keeping track and archiving the important stuff is really not that hard.
- cwyers 12y agoThis is good advice. Hotmail (of all things) has a feature I wish Gmail would implement, similar to the author's suggestion but I think far more useful -- for e-mail newsletters that you specify, it will only keep the most recent. The other thing I would recommend is having separate accounts for work and personal e-mail. I understand that for some people, there's a fair amount of overlap. But even if you just use an alias for work e-mail and put it into a folder in your regular inbox, that separation of concerns can make it a lot less overwhelming.