Written on April 10th, 2008 at 06:04 am by Darren Rowse
From 10000 to 0 Emails in an Inbox in 24 Hours
Over the weekend I decided to get serious about my email situation. I’d been sitting on an inbox with close to 10,000 items in it for months and was feeling more and more stressed by the day.
I posted on Twitter that I needed to do something about it and then decided to take action. Within 24 hours I had an inbox with no items in it (well momentarily) and have been able to maintain that ever since (OK, so it’s only three days, but it’s been a very busy three days).
A number of people asked me to give an update on what I did – here’s a very quick summary (by the way – thanks to the many Twitter followers who offered advice):
I moved all my email activity to Gmail
To do this I forwarded all of my previous email addresses and contact forms so that they now arrive in my Gmail inbox. Previously I’d use Mail.app (mac) to fetch email from 5 different email addresses and synced it with Mac.com using IMAP so I could retrieve it from two computers. Now I’m using Gmail online rather than a client to sort them all. It does mean I can only access email while online – but I think this in itself will be helpful as it decreases the time I am using email.
Merciless Unsubscribing
Email 101 lessons always say that you should unsubscribe to as many newsletters as you can. I was getting about 50 a week, most of which I didn’t EVER read. The first thing I did on Sunday was to unsubscribe from most of them and delete the majority of past ones that I’d put in my ‘read one day’ folder.
I’m using Gmail’s ‘filtering’ and ‘labels heavily
I’d heard for some time now how good Gmail was at filtering but until the weekend I’d not investigated it. I so wish someone had sat me down earlier and forced me to do it. On Sunday I sat down for an hour and went through every email that I’d received for the last week. I didn’t do this to catch up on email but to get a filtering system in place.
The problem that I faced previously is that I get close to 1000 emails a day. Some of them are comments from my blogs, some are social media friend requests, some are reader questions, some are metrics reports, some of them are newsletters, some are from b5 colleagues…. the list goes on. The issue I had was that there’s so much clutter that I was spending an hour or so each day just filtering through them all. I did have Mail.app filter out some of them but only had about 6 ‘rules’ set up.
Now I have over 50 ‘filters’ in my Gmail account (and I continue to add more as more emails come in). I’m using filters in two ways:
1. Stopping myself from ever seeing unnecessary email – so much of the email that I get is just not important at all – or at the least it’s email that I might want to keep but don’t need to read immediately (if at all). For example, so much of the social media site email that I get from ‘friends’ is superfluous. While I’d like to occasionally check friend requests on facebook I don’t need to see them as they come in. I could switch off notifications altogether but as I do like to quickly scan them each day I now filter any with a command to ’skip my inbox’ (so they are archived but never seen in my inbox) and ‘labled’ as ’social media’. This means that I can quickly scan them all (along with hundreds of less important other social media requests and messages) quickly once or twice a week.
I do the same now with notifications from Aweber when someone subscribes to a newsletter, notifications from the DPS forum which tell me when a new thread is started and the same with blog comments (although I scan this more regularly.
In this way I still have an record of each of these emails archived so that I can access them – but they never hit my inbox.
2. Labeling other Semi Important Email for Quick Archiving – not all email can be archived quite so quickly. There are other types of emails that I like to see, even though I don’t need to respond to them. What I’ve done with this is to filter them differently. I still label them automatically as they come in – but let them hit my inbox. The advantage of this is that they’re already labeled so that once I’ve read them all I have to do is quickly read them when they arrive and then do a one click on ‘archive’ to have them put in the right label area so that I can access them quickly later. When I get a notification that someone has put a new ad on my Job Board (an email that I never have to respond to but like to know about) I get the notification but can have it archived within half a second rather than having to manually label it. It only saves a second or two but when you do it hundreds of times a day it counts!
Identify the Important Stuff
I have some emails that I consider extra specially important. Email from my wife, boss (at b5), email from my contact forms on my blogs, any email with the words ‘I hate you’….. You know the kind.
With this type of email I again use filtering but instead of hiding it I highlight it. So any email coming from my wife’s email address, or with certain words in it, or a certain subject line (eg my contact form’s) I can set up with a label like ‘important’. I could also assign it with a ’star’ (like a flag in many email clients). Even more ‘attention grabbing’ is the ability to assign labels with colors. So for example I’ve assigned the label ‘ProBlogger Email’ (all email from my contact form) as having a bright ORANGE label to catch my attention so that I can quickly see them in my inbox when i wake up in the morning.
Aggressive ‘Archiving’
I mentioned earlier that my inbox had 10,000 items in it. How was I going to get that number down? Well the cool thing about filtering is that it can be retrospective. I was able to get the numbers in my inbox down by well over half by just applying all my filters for non important items to all my old emails too.
I also was able to identify the important ones and clear a lot of them. This left a few thousand…. which…. well…. I ‘archived’. Yep, it’s cheating a little but here’s the thing. Those emails went back for a year. If I hadn’t dealt with an email from someone that’s a year old then it’s too late. I did keep them all in case I need to do a search – but sometimes a guy needs to draw a line in the sand and my line was on Sunday evening at 11pm!
If you sent me an email prior to that and you have not got a reply to it – my sincere apologies but it got caught in the great email culling of 2008 and I’d invite you to try again – it’s much more likely to be read now… I promise… at least for the next few days.
Other Stuff I love about Gmail:
- One click ‘report spam’ that actually learns
- Threaded viewing of related emails (conversations) – Mail.app has it but Gmails is so intuitive and useable
- Search that works… fast
- Chat – I’ve only used it once but it was handy. First impressions of it are that it’s useful but that it’ll need further refinement
- Shortcuts – I’m learning one a day – I figure in a month I’ll know most of them off by heart
I’ve got a long way to go with Gmail but after a few days of using it it’s saving me hours each day. I’m also not completely satisfied with the way I’m managing my email and think I’ll probably add some new labels to help me manage emails that I still need to deal with less urgently (perhaps a ‘ToDo’ label) – but one step at a time!
Feel free to add your own email tips in comments below – teach me friends!
PS: also check out Leo’s post with 12 rules for getting a grip on massive email.
127 Responses to “From 10000 to 0 Emails in an Inbox in 24 Hours” - Add Yours
Shannon Lilly
April 10th, 2008 6:08 am
I know how you feel, I really need to work on my emails but I only have about 3,000 sitting around. Should not take to long to fix up!
Kelvin Oliver
April 10th, 2008 6:20 am
I hardly every get that many emails. I usually loook forward to getting emails since I really don’t get that many.. just a lot of spam. I don’t hardly get any email pertaining to blogging or strictly to my blog. Hopefully I will get something.
boostranks
April 10th, 2008 6:21 am
good news, gmail has imap support, so you can sync to mail.app or .mac to work offline. labels are folders.
non-idiot
April 10th, 2008 6:31 am
don’t be a n00b and signup to mailing lists……..select all items(emails) and click DELETE, DONE!!!!
Lori
April 10th, 2008 6:33 am
I wrote a tutorial on filtering your emails into different folders. It’s not near as extreme as you have gone to “clean” things up but it’s a start!
I’ve never used GMAIL, I’ve always used Yahoo (paid) and that has worked great for me. I hate switching mail programs.
I bet it took some time for you to get completely organized! Congrats on an early start to spring cleaning:)
Jon - Ninja Blog Setup
April 10th, 2008 6:39 am
Don’t forget to check your spam folder regularly. Yes, the “Report Spam” button learns, but there will always be false positives, and you need to “Not Spam” them, so the filter can learn what isn’t spam as well.
One trick I’ve been doing for a while is to setup an alternate gmail account that I use for newsletters. Then I go and check it once a week or so, cuts down on the clutter in my inbox, and I don’t worry if the person I’m giving my email address to is less than scrupulous. If I end up getting spam, I abandon that account and move on to a new one.
Andrew Flusche
April 10th, 2008 6:41 am
I’m glad you found the bliss of Gmail! Filters and labels are a must, and so is archiving. Although I’m not nearly as innundated with email as you.
Check out my Gmail tips for bacn, spam, and steak.
Charlie Gilkey | Productive Flourishing
April 10th, 2008 6:47 am
My computer crashed last year and for a while I used Gmail exclusively. I noticed that I didn’t fiddle with email as much, but that I still got everything done with much more piece of mind because my Inbox wasn’t a morass of unknown things to do.
What I didn’t like about it was some of my email indicated that it was sent via Gmail and people responded to my Gmail address, which caused havoc to my system because I used filters based off of where the email came from. This could probably be fixed, but my computer came back and I went to my old routine.
I may give Gmail a try again, though. Thanks for sharing, Darren.
Ades
April 10th, 2008 6:50 am
Welcome aboard! timely move.
My Internet Business Review
April 10th, 2008 6:58 am
Very goot tips, organizing your mailing is very important with gmail its so much easier also in gmail i dont get any spam so its really great
My Internet Business Review
April 10th, 2008 6:59 am
Great article, managing and organizing in your business can be very important as always great tips!
infmom
April 10th, 2008 7:00 am
One other way to get a good start on keeping the inbox as empty as possible is to stop and consider whether any particular email really needs to be saved. Make good use of the delete button!
I have MailWasher Pro pick up all my email from all my POP/IMAP enabled accounts (including Gmail). That allows me to delete spam and unwanted emails right away. I then use Eudora to download the remainder–and I have plenty of filters and appropriate mailboxes to route things to. One mailbox is strictly for newsletters, and I only look at that every couple days or so.
Gmail’s spam filter is the best I’ve seen, but it still gets the occasional false positive so I check the spam inbox once or twice a week to make sure I haven’t missed something. Then I click on “delete all spam messages now.” It feels good, like taking out the trash. :)
Brad Blogging.com - Making Your Blog Better Through Personal Experience
April 10th, 2008 7:00 am
The “Delete” button usually works for me the best :)
Jarel
April 10th, 2008 7:01 am
Welcome to the club! :-) Gmail has so much to offer especially along with google reader, documents, etc. that it keeps a large amount of my day to day very organized and timely.
Google has awesome services and they all work together well, anywhere that internet is available. Which is everywhere these days. :-)
Paul
April 10th, 2008 7:07 am
When I signed up with Gmail I setup my filters immediately. I didn’t want to have hundreds of e-mails in my Inbox unorganized.
I now have many filters and labels in place to help keep my e-mail organized.
Troy Duncan
April 10th, 2008 7:09 am
I’m in the process to moving all of my computing to the clouds.
My next project is moving all of my Outlook e-mail to Gmail. There seems to be no easy way to do this. The best solution I could find was this tech heavy solution.
Dave Atkins
April 10th, 2008 7:09 am
I made the move to gmail recently too and while I am having a little difficulty with the conversations concept, I think it will make life easier. I recently wrote a tutorial on how to move email out of Outlook and into Gmail, so you can completely abandon your old Outlook client.
Daw Web Hosting Blog
April 10th, 2008 7:14 am
I find myself in the same situation every day. I receive about 500 daily messages. Unfortunately most of those are business correspondense. Many emails (20 – 30) come from people who ask for advice, want to advertise or want to exchange ideas. Add regular correspondence (50 – 80) messages/day and here they are… 3 hours dealing with inbox only. Unfortunately spam is growing so I still need to deal with others.
Unfortunately using GMail or Yahoo doesn’t work for me. So Shift + Del ;)
Shawn
April 10th, 2008 7:19 am
I know what you feel like Darren. I use Gmail and Mail, and I have close to 100 rules and labels between the two of them.
But welcome to the wonderful world of Gmail.
Bontb
April 10th, 2008 7:20 am
Hope you filtered my name by it self. You know I email bomb you all the time lol. But I very much appreciate the answers I know how it is to be busy and especially getting emails.
Glad you switch to big G :)
Adam Pieniazek
April 10th, 2008 7:22 am
Be careful with Gmail’s spam system Darren. It’s good but not perfect, it even marks Google Alerts as spam!
I just did some spring cleaning myself over the weekend to my email. I had about 5,000 or so emails sitting in my inbox and tons of them were from facebook or some other social media site. I’m down to a much more respectable 99 right now and s
hould be able to clear those out soon too. I had the urge to do a mass archive of emails but knew it’d cause me to worry if I missed something important.
Congrats on getting rid of your email clutter.
baldeagle
April 10th, 2008 7:23 am
I used to really struggle with email. Then I realized that I was fighting myself. I now try to segregate my mail from the start. All of my newsletters go to the same Yahoo! mail account and all of my personal mail goes to my Gmail account. Business/blog mail goes to one of two other accounts. And I keep an account for signing up for things that I suspect will lead to spam. I’ve found organizing at the front end helps tremendously (as does being able to read very fast! ;) ).
Aziz Poonawalla
April 10th, 2008 7:32 am
Hi Darren,
I recently had a post titled “Declaration of email independence” that takes it a step further – the idea is not just to filter email, but ruthlessly reduce the amount you receive. Do take a look.
Jesse
April 10th, 2008 7:33 am
I dont know what I would do without email filters. I know everyone hates outlook, but considering I have to use it for my “real” job plus various blogs, the tons of email all go to their correct places and subfolders. Makes life pretty easy :)
The Masked Millionaire
April 10th, 2008 7:34 am
OMG….If I keep 20 emails around I start freaking. I guess I make quick decisions concerning email.
esvl
April 10th, 2008 7:36 am
I had 6000 emails the other day. Even though there were important emails in there I decided to delete it all.
A clean inbox is just less stressful.
Nuno Teixeira
April 10th, 2008 7:48 am
Wow! How perfect I found this! I just lost my Macbook Pro to a faulty video card. This in turn has shut me out of my email application: Thunderbird. Multiple email archives unreachable.
I was in the middle of moving my emails to gmail last week and never backed up the archived stuff on Thunderbird. You’ve encouraged the last push to get me to through every email of mine into Gmail and LEARN the filtering and labeling options to maximize my efficiency as well as minimize my stress levels!
Thanks!
Nuno XEI
Josh
April 10th, 2008 7:51 am
I use many of the same techniques. I have something like 20 tags to organize emails I get (from netflix, to my masters project, to amazon emails, to the general “saved” category). The sending emails to certain addresses directly to another folder (or the trash) is a good idea, though.
I also have several addresses forwarded to my gmail, including email from a domain I still own but don’t use it for email anymore – but I still get email at those addresses which get caught in the “catch all” account which very soon starts eating away at my web space. So I just forward that to gmail, most of which goes straight to spam, but I should write a script so that all of it goes straight to spam or trash.
As for the spam – maybe I don’t get enough email a day (probably 20 to 30 a day land in my inbox, and who knows how many more in my spam box). I’ll sometimes take a look in my spam box, and I almost never see legit mail in there (actually, the problem is usually when the spammers figure out something new, spam starts making it’s way into my inbox again and I have to mark it).
Terra Andersen
April 10th, 2008 7:53 am
I learned the trials and tribulations of email clutter very early on in my career. I recieve about as much email as you do, and it’s so stresseful to open a program like Outlook and see it fill up for about 4 minutes after the program initially opens.
I also use gmail for most of my business-related emails. It’s got a wonderful spam filter. Better than any that I’ve ever seen.
andymurd
April 10th, 2008 8:04 am
Once you go GMail, you never go back!
If you are a GTD aficionado, there are loads of great posts on lifehacker et al about keeping your inbox low and your time free. I personally get great results from the GTDInbox Firefox plugin (http://www.gtdinbox.com) but it all depends on how you roll.
Congrats on sorting out the inbox – keep it clean!
Bill Perry
April 10th, 2008 8:48 am
Darren,
I did exactly the same thing with my Gmail account a couple months back. Even down to unsubscribe from newsletters and email “mini-courses”.
One additional thing I did with that, however, is I added a label called “Crap I unsubbed from” which catches all emails from lists and newsletters I’ve unsubscribed from.
So far, it actually caught 2 different email lists that didn’t actually unsubscribe me. I have since contacted the owners of those 2 lists and got it resolved.
Funny, I was thinking about posting about what I did as a “productivity” post to my blog. But I talked myself out of it saying “nobody would be interested in knowing that”.
LOL
Bill Perry
April 10th, 2008 8:53 am
Darren,
I forgot to mention, I was at 9,700 emails or something myself when I did my purge. It took me 2 days, because I had to take a break during it to go to work.
Bill Perry
April 10th, 2008 9:04 am
Kelvin>
I don’t get nearly as many emails as I used to get. So now, the email I DO get is, for the most part, much anticipated.
I can’t even begin to explain how much better it feels now that I’ve made the purge.
Its cool because now even mail that still manages to hit the inbox is somewhat relevant, and if not, easily sent to spam
The Internet Apprentice
April 10th, 2008 9:12 am
Hmmm, I didn’t realize how powerful G-Mail could be. I think I may have to set up an account for myself. Thanks for the tip!
- Dave
Frugal Dad
April 10th, 2008 10:04 am
Great tip on G-Mail, and inbox management as a whole. I agree with you on the newsletters, but I still won’t unsubscribe from the ProBlogger book newsletter I signed up for yesterday!
Coop
April 10th, 2008 10:25 am
Hi Darren,
I’ve been very happy with G-Mail. Filters out most spam, and with the “rules” I track my business expenses with folders like “Bus:Books” etc.
P.S. How’s the personal training coming?
Best,
Coop
Hugo
April 10th, 2008 10:32 am
I like this, but I would really want to have my email available offline, so I’d be looking at some of the options that are available for combining it.
I thougt Mail.app did quite a good job, but the rules in Gmail seem more powerful?
Bill Perry
April 10th, 2008 10:34 am
Hugo: Gmail does allow access to your email via POP3 access. Just have to enable it under the “settints>pop3 access” menu option.
I’ve occasionally had gmail set up with POP3 to allow access to my emails via Outlook 2003.
Stu Andrews
April 10th, 2008 10:37 am
Darren,
Great to see you blogging your GMail experiences. Been a converted one for a couple of years now, and loving it.
Once they do get it offline, FEAR GOOGLE. :)
cindy*staged4more
April 10th, 2008 10:57 am
I think the ability of let go is important (funny, in my job I tell people to let go of their stuff and declutter, but I can’t seem to do that for my emails!). I subscribe to about 100 blogs and I never can just delete them all after accumulating them after a week when I am busy at work. I use yahoo still, which gets a lot of spam. But I love the folder options, it filters my emails so I can concentrate on purely business emails.
Cheers,
Cindy
Patricia Müller
April 10th, 2008 11:00 am
Darren, I’ve been dealing with the very same problem and the same amount of clutter in my inbox for a few months now. Thanks for posting this, I thought I’d never be able to clean my inbox in my GMail account, but this has encouraged me to do the same thing as you did. I do use labels and filters, but I started using them effectively when it was already too late.
Just like you, I’ve got very old emails that are just sitting there and I can’t find the time to go through them because I’m struggling as it is to keep up with new incoming emails. I’ve always felt bad about deleting them, but like you said, if you haven’t dealt with them in a year, it’s already too late.
I think I’ll build up the courage and clean up my inbox this weekend…
(btw, I did send you an email through the contact form and never got a reply. :p However, since I deal with more email than I can handle myself, it was perfectly understandable to me).
John Lockwood
April 10th, 2008 11:28 am
I’m so glad you feel better.
By the way, I just sent you an email.
No — just kidding. :)
Jeremy
April 10th, 2008 11:32 am
Some more gmail tips:
1 – Always apply an archive filter to emails you don’t want to hit your inbox (unless it’s spam, then spam it)
2 – You can forward from Gmail to other email addresses – this makes it much better than say Yahoo or Hotmail because you can always switch email accounts down the line by setting up a simple autoforward
3 – Gspace – An FTP thingy for your Gmail account, beautiful
4 – Yup – you can juggle dozens of email accounts with Gmail, which makes it great.
Chris Guthrie
April 10th, 2008 12:09 pm
I’m already using Gmail but I could definetely do a better job of just removing items I don’t need.
I’m sitting at about 4000 emails in my Gmail account and about 7000 emails in my Hotmail account lol…
Killer Pickle
April 10th, 2008 12:26 pm
Ever since I got my iPhone I had to switch from hotmail to gmail because Apple doesn’t mesh well with Microsoft. For years I used hotmail and I am kicking myself now for not switching to gmail sooner. BTW I highly recommend gmail!
Jamey Lucas
April 10th, 2008 12:29 pm
I’ve moved all of my Thinkbytes domain email accounts to Gmail, and it’s been amazing the amount of spam they will catch.
I love the filters, and labels, now my email is easy to sort though.
Jacob
April 10th, 2008 12:51 pm
Gmail is a must-have for power email users with multiple accounts. Even with my email addresses all over the net, I haven’t gotten spam in my inbox since the first few months of using Gmail.
I have each of my accounts filter into separate labels and folders where mailing lists dump new posts that I can check all at once. Gmail is the best for reaching Inbox Zero.
Also, the Google Talk enhanced sidebar to chat with contacts who are also online using Gmail is a handy way to cut down on quick replies.
Enjoy it.
Tom Beaton
April 10th, 2008 12:56 pm
It just has to be done. I too have moved to GMail and I would recommend it to anyone!
Otto
April 10th, 2008 2:17 pm
Thanks for the tips. That was a gutsy thing to do, start afresh!
I promise not to send you any emails ok. Heck, seeing you have a North Fitzroy address, (only a short tram ride for my place) I’d sooner drop in…lol…
Vicky
April 10th, 2008 2:27 pm
Another way is to hire someone like myself, a virtual assistant to take care of it for you. The average person spends 9 hours a week on their E-mail.
Chris (Amateur Traveler)
April 10th, 2008 2:36 pm
I suggested to my team at work (40-45 people) that they use in box zero as an approach. One of the people on my team has 42,000 emails in his inbox.
Alejandro Reyes
April 10th, 2008 3:03 pm
Thanks for updating us bro! Great stuff and I’m dreading getting to my inbox!
elizabeth ramer
April 10th, 2008 4:26 pm
I don’t want to sound like the bluebird of happiness here, but it’s incredibly dangerous to leave your mail on a server on the internet.
1. Servers crash. I don’t care if they’re related to google or not, they do crash. Imagine you have years of archived email on gmail and it crashes one day. Oopsie! Someone forgot to backup! (free service – highly doubful they back up)
2. Servers get hacked.
I know what it’s like to get tons of mail – I get thousands for one email address alone. I went from netscape mail to thunderbird mail, all my mail and newsreaders are in one spot. I also back it up – I have email backed up to 1993. Or maybe it’s 96 – I would have to look. But still – I have it here locally.
I keep my inbox to 200 or less (I aim to keep it below 100 but that’s rare) – everything gets filtered into folders and it’s all good.
Don’t leave your mail on anyone’s server.
kc govens
April 10th, 2008 4:42 pm
I am glad that I ran across your blog, because i presently
have over 30,000 emails in my account and have been wandering how i am going to get rid of the not important
ones and keep the one i need. The hint about using gmail
filtering i will use it to help solve my problem. Aloha and
thanks from Hawaii.
Robin
April 10th, 2008 4:51 pm
Some notes from a Gmail user:
1. The Add Account feature is so cool. Users can use 1 account as a ‘remote control’ for all of his Gmail accounts.
2. Google Apps for domains.
3. Gmail skin firefox extension. Can opt to horizontal layout, makes gmail even easier to navigate.
4. Labnol.org has a great number of posts related to make the most of Gmail.
William
April 10th, 2008 6:22 pm
Don’t read this. Just let it sit around forever. It will do you some good to look at it from time to time, take a deep breath, relax and say: “Nothing to do here; no response required.” Just feel the calm building up.
Felex Tan
April 10th, 2008 8:10 pm
Incredible,how you make it.I have 1000 mails in my inbox ,have not deleted yet.
Lisman
April 10th, 2008 8:24 pm
Hi Darren,
Please advice me how to make or modificate the web template from wordpress to be like this (problogger.net).
Thanks for advice
Lisman
David Airey
April 10th, 2008 9:14 pm
I’m a big GMail advocate, although be wary of the security limitations. Using GMail led to the theft of my domain name.
I still use the service, but am much more wary than I was before.
Ali from the Office Diet
April 10th, 2008 10:46 pm
I too have discovered the joy of setting up a rule for dealing with incoming mail, having joined a mailing list of bloggers… it really helps to be able to read/deal with all those emails in one batch, and I don’t even have to see them now unless I open the group’s folder.
I wish I’d got to grips with email rules years ago!
Still need to sort out all the newsletters, facebook notifications, etc, mind…
Ali
Anne
April 10th, 2008 11:58 pm
Darren…….I LOVE G-mail! I used to use Outlook email and it was a nightmare. G-mail is especially good at getting rid of spam and very rarely grabs something that isn’t spam.
Dave Leake
April 11th, 2008 12:04 am
Thanks, Darren. I’ve learned more about Gmail from this post than in my three months of fiddling with it. One simple thing still escapes me . . . how to forward email to several people in my Gmail address book. I’ve found a cumbersome solution, but I’m sure there’s a simple one I’ve just overlooked. Help, anyone?
Note to elizabeth ramer: storing email on your hard drive doesn’t mean you won’t lose it. I overtaxed my Juno storage with thousands of emails in dozens of folders. My computer froze and, when I restored it, Presto! No email. Not even Juno tech support could help me get it back.
Also, elizabeth, if you think Google and Gmail are on a single server, think again. Think banks of servers, backed up by other banks of servers in other locations. Besides, in the near future, you won’t want a hard drive. Computing in the cloud will be better for us all.
Mark Claudius Png
April 11th, 2008 1:25 am
Hey that’s great. I made the move to Gmail about 3 months ago because I found Apple Mail getting a little bit too cluttered. First of all, it was almost impossible to find what I wanted, and secondly, I really needed a good webmail system. Stuff like squirrel and Horde have really driven me crazy.
I managed to find some material online pointing to using Grease Monkey in order to achieve HTML Gmail signatures and even use your labels as folders. I’ve written an article on that anyway on my website – http://www.shoutlabs.com/lang/en/blog/gmail-labels-as-folders/
I’ve pretty much gone crazy with the use of these two features, with over 200 folders. Funny thing is I don’t find it cluttered. And Gmail’s search capability is just so awesome. Comes in very handy when you’re trying to find those emails that contain passwords to some social network you signed up for.
Gmail ROCKS!!!!!
Jared Goralnick
April 11th, 2008 2:02 am
Really glad that you were able to get to the elusive 0. You hit on a lot of great tips in your posts–especially about even labeling the things you’re going to archive very shortly (DMs on Twitter are an easy application of that).
As another reader mentioned earlier, IMAP is always an option for when you’re traveling. You might want to consider setting up IMAP to only sync your IMPORTANT and INBOX folders–this way you could respond to all your message on a plane, etc.
Good luck maintaining the empty box!
Mark Cuda
April 11th, 2008 2:32 am
Actually, Gmail has a feature where you can set it to notify you on your Mac when you get a new email :D
Robin
April 11th, 2008 3:18 am
Oddly enough I found that it was only when I was trying to use Gmail exclusively that I got myself genuinely behind in emails. Even with the use of filtering and labelling I found myself well behind. So I switched to a much more intense configuration of Outlook 07 and lots of rule filters and now i find myself well on top of the 7-800 mails a day I receive.
One of the biggest advantages of this I’ve found is the ability it gives me to clear away large chunks of email in downtimes when I wouldn’t otherwise be able to access the internet (e.g. when flying). Rather than knowing that when I could get web access again I’d have double the number of mails, instead I know that I’ll have a clear inbox with a large number of replies ready to send as soon as I log on again. I think the greater ability to work offline is one of the bigger advantages that Outlook (or indeed any other mail client) has over the likes of Gmail.
Not that this is an argument to say “you’re wrong”, but I find it interesting that to effectively solve the same problem we’ve gone in entirely different directions in relation to Gmail.
suresh
April 11th, 2008 3:40 am
Nice to hear about this as many bloggers valuable time is consumed in reading unwanted mails.
In my case i won’t subscribe for any news letter and when i feel like important i used to book mark that page and visit back when time permits.
Any way good post and a big thank you as usual.
Luis Gross
April 11th, 2008 5:47 am
This is very useful, as I see my inbox grow more and more every week I will be needing to filter my e-mails as well. I also have Gmail never checked out the features, now I will thanks for the tip Darren.
Nantucket Art
April 11th, 2008 5:50 am
Aggressive ‘Archiving’ – LOL
Inspiring stuff – my turn next – say goodbye to Friday!!
Thinkjayant
April 11th, 2008 6:05 am
Good move. Its better to move to gmail for all its advantages. But i wonder how can you manage 50 filters. Over time its gonna give you more pain than good, with important mails getting missed. Rather use the OR and AND operators and combine few filters into one. Remember the few filters to manage, the better. Same goes with labels. Use broad categories, but not too broad.
I use thunderbird and gmail IMAP combination to keep track for all my emails. Although it consist of more of group mails, subscriptions and that from friends rather than web related activities. Counts at around 200 mails per day. Was planning to write a general tutorial on how to manage email. You kinda beat me into it. Difficulties of a weekend blogger ;-(
Josh
April 11th, 2008 10:26 am
One thing I like about Gmail is when you click the checkbox next to several emails and you click into a particular email to see it then return to the inbox, all the emails that you checked off are still checked. This is not so with Hotmail. Yea Gmail.
Kishor
April 11th, 2008 11:07 am
So you are now giving away all your data to google.
Bill Perry
April 11th, 2008 1:10 pm
Josh> Yes, I really love that about Gmail too. It’s one of the reasons I originally moved away from fulltime hotmail and yahoo usage.
Yay Gmail
Boo Hotmail
Boo Yahoo
Boo Outlook
:-)
kristarella
April 11th, 2008 3:48 pm
Nice work!
I finally got my act together after watching Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero presentation (video at bottom of the page). Your filtering system is a bit more extensive than mine, but I get far fewer emails.
I still have two of my email addresses going into mail.app, but they seem to be picking up traffic, so I might need to sort them out a bit better too.
Umm, not sure about some of elizabeth’s reasoning right there.
All I can say is, yes – they do.
Your mail has to hit a server at some point. I guess if you’re worried about past sensitive material then that could be an issue, but even if you don’t keep your mail on a server, a hacker could copy/intercept future emails. I’m no expert, you can prove me wrong, but I’m pretty sure they could do that.
Keiron
April 11th, 2008 6:49 pm
Inbox Zero, and GTD for that matter have changed myself and a few colleagues lives – I’m gradually getting my inbox under control but I don’t think I could integrate it all into one place that meant I had to be online…
I use Thunderbird to bring it all down and then use it’s auto-filtering and rules to sort it all out for me. Now if I could just tidy up my Google Reader RSS feeds as much as my inbox I’m sure everything would be fine!
Adam
April 11th, 2008 11:24 pm
I’m doing exactly this just now. 21000 unread messages going back 4 years. I’m doing it so I can get Outlook to run smoothly through IMAP to collect my Gmail. Good on you for getting it done in a day.
elizabeth ramer
April 11th, 2008 11:37 pm
Note to Dave Leake:
> Note to elizabeth ramer: storing email on your hard drive > > doesn’t mean you won’t lose it.
I’ve never lost a huge amount of email to a harddrive crash or any other event. Yes, I’ve lost a couple of emails in this kind of event. But it was only a couple of emails- because I make backups. I backup my email to a second harddrive, then that gets backed up to cds/dvds. That’s why I have mail from 93 or 96. I learned early on in the game how to backup.
I’m in the tech industry and email is my lifeline – I use my email program as a database, and rarely is it under 500 megs – I’m not about to trust something like this to a free service.If I do lose my harddrive, the first thing that is put back and used is my email – just a matter of copying the folder from one drive or cd to the c drive.
Which brings me to another point: your computer can lockup – so can theirs. Backups can easily be overwritten, become corrupted, deleted – the list is endless.
Note to Dave Leake and Kristerella:
> Also, elizabeth, if you think Google and Gmail are on a >single server, think again. Think banks of servers, backed >up by other banks of servers in other locations.
I’m aware of how google is set up, in general. It doesn’t mean I’m gonna trust them (or anbody else but myself) with my email or other data. The question is: how do they back up for a free service? Is it incremental? Is it hourly? Is it daily? Is it monthly? Is it at all? It’s free, remember. They do state on their page at http://mail.google.com/mail/help/about_privacy.html:
that they do keep mail on the server for “Some limited period of time.” Now that’s reassuring. It reassures me that I won’t keep my mail on their servers. (That’s the only mention I could find of backing up, btw)
You might ask yourself this: If all of your gmail went away, all of your contacts, answered email were to simply go away right now, and you didn’t have it local, would it help or harm you?
Note to Kristerella:
>Your mail has to hit a server at some point.
You are correct in that. It actually may hit several servers in bits and pieces before it hits my box. It also travels in plain text.
And what’s my reasoning? I’ve been in the webhosting industry since 1997 and I’ve seen it happen. People have lost some valuable email because they thought we had a backup, and never saved their mail locally.
We did have backups. Backups get corrupted. Things happen. I’ve seen webmail programs that lockup as well, you open your program and poof it’s gone. (Google cannot retrieve deleted email, either)
My point is: just don’t use a free service as your primary mail handler. Keep it for backup, maybe, but just as you would your website, keep a backup locally. I use gmail (and other free services) for mail that I don’t
care about. If it went away all of a sudden I wouldn’t bat an eye.
kristarella
April 12th, 2008 12:46 am
To be honest, I’d be disappointed if I lost all my email addresses… so maybe I’ll go and use Gmail’s contacts export feature now, but it wouldn’t be a crisis if I lost my emails. I process them properly then a majority of them are dealt with and I don’t need them again.
I’m sure we’re in very different situations, so if your system works for you, then cool. :)
kristarella
April 12th, 2008 12:46 am
elizabeth, to be honest, I’d be disappointed if I lost all my email addresses… so maybe I’ll go and use Gmail’s contacts export feature now, but it wouldn’t be a crisis if I lost my emails. I process them properly then a majority of them are dealt with and I don’t need them again.
I’m sure we’re in very different situations, so if your system works for you, then cool. :)
GW
April 12th, 2008 12:02 pm
So this might be a stupid question but I honestly have no idea. I’m thinking about setting up a Gmail account but I’m wondering if Gmail has a good virusscan or not…
kristarella
April 12th, 2008 3:10 pm
GW – Gmail does scan all attachments, I have no idea how effective it is, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never downloaded a virus.
Michael
April 13th, 2008 5:54 am
Great post, it is always good to take some time and get some of those emails taken care of. All too often people who get a lot of emails just leave them in their inbox which ultimately ends with thousands of emails unattended to.
Brandon Lee
April 13th, 2008 6:58 am
Yep, I had this same issue, and I did the same thing about 1 year ago. It made my email situation troubles go away. Heavy archiving, great filtering, if you run many websites like I do and get contact emails from each site, you can setup multiple emails in google and when you reply, it still comes from that specific email address. It’s great! I suggest this to people all the time.
Joe
April 13th, 2008 7:29 am
Yah! Go Gmail!
One function of Gmail I found really good is the “mark as read” ability. Saved me tons of time.
Mike Inkster
April 13th, 2008 9:11 am
Thanks Darren and everyone here for a great post and answers. I have cleaned out and filed a lot of mail this weekend, from my 9 gmail accounts. Had close to 15000 E-mails.
I use Gmail a lot, as I use several safelists for promoting, along with several traffic exchanges.
As for viruses I have not received one in three years I haved used it.
GW
April 14th, 2008 6:51 am
Thanks kristarella and Mike Inkster for the info. :-)
Miss Gisele B | myBeautyMatch.com
April 14th, 2008 1:52 pm
Thanks Darren for your tip.
I also did some email-merging this past weekend in order to increase my productivity and cut back on email log in.
I still have to make decisions on 2 email accounts, but I’ve paired things down.
Miss Gisele B.
Fat Lotus
April 15th, 2008 10:34 am
I simply have a filter that automatically move all read emails and emails over a week old into the trash. I don’t get the several thousand emails you get, but it’s better to miss a few emails then spend several hours a day reading them.
Christian
April 15th, 2008 12:20 pm
Love it. I have been putting this off for a long time. I started using gmail quite a while ago and find myself leaning towards it more and more. Great post. Thanks!
Mau
April 15th, 2008 1:25 pm
I love Gmail, and one tool that has also helped me a lot to filter email manually is a Blackberry and it’s Gmail’s app for it: I often archive, delete, or star emails with the click of a button and my inbox is kept lean. I know, you are often found being alerted, but it definitely has reduced my desk time for checking my emails.
yiwei
April 15th, 2008 3:20 pm
I love gmail! I’m logged on 24/7 and it’s more user-friendly than all my other emails – hotmail, yahoo, school email etc.
EngLee
April 15th, 2008 5:12 pm
I have a similar situation, and I’m working on it. It took 2 weeks to get it down to 200 from 3000. Will be able to finish it before the weekend.
Maybe I’ll make a blog post when I’m finish.
Luke
April 15th, 2008 5:54 pm
I think using gmail as a conduit is really handy.. It checks my emails and then forwards them to me where I need them.. saves me having to be “online” in an environment that doesn’t like “webmail”… labelling also makes it easier to delete crap.
KISS
April 16th, 2008 12:22 am
Let me help the author of this article and anyone in the same position
1. Do not subscribe to newsletters – unless you know you will read it then don’t subscribe. This will save you having to unsubscribe. A little forethought goes a long way
2. Do not check the box to receive updates from “friends” on social networks. If you keep reading my suggestions, what you will quickly get is that if you make good decisions upfront you wont have to “fix” things later. You don”t need e-mails from so -called “friends”. If they are really friends, you will be exchanging e-mails or phone calls, if they are just people who asked to be associated with you in a social network and you accept mail, you are getting spammed and you deserve it.
The list continues like this for several pages with the theme being – don’t be stupid and you won’t have to figure a way out of the problems caused by your stupidity.
The library of congress is full of books. If you wanted to read would you check out 30% of the books or 1 book? Limit your “automated” processes for “checking out books”. When you need information you will seek it out, Keeping you inbox clear means that important e-mails from real friends, real family, clients , etc will be able to get to you without weeding though a sea of self induced electronic spam.
KISS – keep it simple stupid
The author should be less proud of their “accomplishment” and more embarrassed at the bad decisions they made and continue to make.
Elliot
April 16th, 2008 12:44 am
I’m not a gmail hater, but I just don’t see it being one bit better than any other real mail server. Are you all comparing it to Hotmail and Exchange? Any other mail system seems to work quite well.
Balu
April 16th, 2008 1:02 am
One big issue for me is that I can not filter by any header (or did that change yet?).
E.g. I’m sending mails from froms with special X-something headers, but gmail does not allow me to filter by those :-(
Mike
April 16th, 2008 2:39 am
A really great trick for todo lists or any other list:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1871092,00.asp
Basically anything sent to your gmail with the “+label” in it still goes to your inbox. I.E. problogger+todo@gmail.com would still reach your problogger gmail account and you can set up a filter to read anything from problogger+todo@gmail.com and set a label to it. Great for emailing yourself reminders.
Anyway – Great tips since I’m a huge Gmail proponent!
James Lamb
April 16th, 2008 7:06 am
Most Facebook notifications can be received by RSS feed. I’ve done this and turned off the emails. I get them all via the RSS feed and it’s easy to tap j j j j and jump through them in Google Reader.
Another trick for text-based emails (Google Alerts, some newsletters) is to divert them directly to Remember the Milk. (I use a filter to forward them.)
They show up as Notes in tasks. You can quickly read through the Notes and delete and they don’t get lost in a folder/label in Gmail and they’re all waiting and organized to quickly “C”omplete in RTM. (Again, the keyboard comes in very handy.)
kristarella
April 16th, 2008 8:27 am
Elliot, Gmail is way better than hotmail (at least the hotmail I used to use). For one thing it doesn’t attach unsolicited advertisements to the ends of your emails. It’s pretty unproffesional to send people invites to “hotlava.com”.
Also, it can thread comments in intelligent and unobtrusive ways. It has an excellent search tool. Then there’s the labelling etc, which I think is better than hotmail’s folders because you can apply multiple labels to things and some can be transient. For example, leading up to Christmas I label everything to do with Christmas and present ideas as “Christmas”. Makes planning a lot easier, but doesn’t stress me out with those emails sitting in my inbox.
Can’t comment on Yahoo or any other services…
Jeremy
April 16th, 2008 10:36 am
Filtering is not retrospective.
kristarella
April 16th, 2008 1:37 pm
Jeremy, I think the correct response would have been “Wow, I didn’t know filtering was retrospective.” Then you could have created a new filter, done a test search and ticked the box “Apply filter to below conversations”.
wale
April 16th, 2008 3:01 pm
Welcome to the world of Gmail. I think t’s the best out there. I also channel several email messages into one and i can answer from different email address in one screen instead of loggig in and out of my different accounts. This allows for organised viewing and you can manage everything from one place!!!
Elliot
April 17th, 2008 4:04 am
@kristarella -
re: ads on “hotmail”
I don’t disagree on that. Remember, gmail is a distant 3rd in popularity. Don’t think for a second that the “do no evil” company will throw “contextually significant” ads into your emails as soon as they can.
They already have started putting youtube content first on searches having nothing to do with youtube or video.
re: threads
Thunderbird has a thread view. However, if you are practicing an inbox zero sort of strategy, this shouldn’t matter. You shouldn’t have those message in your INBOX.
Like I said, I don’t think gmail “sucks”, I just think that there are other mail services that are as good or better – and don’t put too much power in the hands of one company.
Elliot
April 17th, 2008 4:06 am
@Mike
re: + symbol trick
Most other services can handle the “+” trick for sorting within your single mailbox. We do it. I’m sure just about everyone else does too. http://greenbaynet.com/plustrick
kristarella
April 17th, 2008 9:06 am
Thanks for your reply Elliot. I don’t really want to get into a good/evil discussion on Google. I know someone who insists (strongly) that they don’t influence searches like that. Perhaps people are linking to those videos with those keywords… I dunno. I don’t really care that much. Although I will care if they insert ads into their emails and would argue that they should start offering a paid service to opt out of ads, were that to become the case.
That’s sort of what I meant by unobtrusive threads. You can archive them, but when a new related email comes in it brings the archived thread back to the inbox so you can see the whole conversation. It’s pretty nifty. Way better than the threads I have in Mail.app.
ACDM
April 17th, 2008 11:24 am
OH MY, I went through and email crisis a few weeks back and still cant recover…. I have 1000 plus in my personal and about the same in my work account and I can never get under 100 unread … and they are alll Important… Forget about Newsletters… I have a separate account for those and I cant even get time to read those…
Is it rude to just delete all?
Paul Wilkins
April 17th, 2008 12:19 pm
Here’s a tip that will help, from the Getting Started Guide.
Starred shows you only messages you’ve marked with a star (use stars to mean whatever you’d like).
Many people find that sarring emails is a useful way to indicate “todo” items, or emails that you plan to come back to.
kristarella
April 17th, 2008 1:49 pm
ACDM – it seems silly to delete them all if they really are important. It is rude to delete emails that require a response, but I guess if they’re weeks old they’re probably not important anymore… the sender would have followed up with another email by now, if it is important they’ll probably do that.
dai
April 17th, 2008 1:54 pm
The filter and the thread. I love those features. Labeling is awesome.
However, I am not so sure of “learning” method of spam in Gmail.
Joe Manna
April 19th, 2008 4:12 am
Congrats, Darren! I know attacking 10K e-mails in a day is a huge win.
Tom
May 6th, 2008 12:04 am
I’ve used the same solution: all my mail accounts forwarded on GMail, and now everything works better. Well done.
sigurarm
May 6th, 2008 9:13 pm
I get over 100 mails a day and I use Mail.app
All the maillist mail is automaticly filtered into folders and I visit it when I have the time.
I have bunch of folders for manual sorting too. Mail that I want to keep but I want to know it has arrived.
I use Mail Act-On to label mails I have to act on.
And lastly I have a few Smart Folders to keep track of
1. Labeled mail
2. Mail I know will arrive and be trown away right after reading
3. Mail I want to keep an eye on for some reason or another.
Every month I move everything out of the Inbox into quarterly folders, Q1.2008 etc and do sorting by name and prune once more. Smart folders still work on mails that still have been labeled.
Works like a charm.
Ryan McLean
May 8th, 2008 12:12 am
My next post will be
“How to go from 1 email to 0 in 24 hours…..”
haha just kidding but at the moment that is all I get in my inbox per week for my blog (it’s developing) but I know this will increase
Sally Ferguson
May 28th, 2008 2:29 am
hmmm. This gets me to thinking that it may be possible to reclaim my inbox!
Chris
June 18th, 2008 10:45 am
I am going to have to put this into action! I am getting over 5,000 e-mails a day and going insane!
Christian
June 20th, 2008 6:13 pm
Excellent post. You’re making me salivate over Gmail.
jive
June 24th, 2008 11:37 pm
Unsubscribing to newsletters works only like 50% of the time. I have one newsletter I cannot get unsubscribed to. I just have it in my filter to get deleted on arrival.
JD
June 25th, 2008 6:38 am
Nice work!
You did in a few days, what it took me 3 months to figure out!
Wakas Mir
June 27th, 2008 7:01 pm
Great stuff.. I moved from hotmail to gmail few months ago and never looked back.
What I learnt from the experience was something similar to yours. The amount of mails I was getting reached upto a few thousand mostly being from fans of the radio crazefm.com and my other sites where I give advice etc on various issues people have. But funnily I was having issues myself with taking out time to filter out as you did.
I am very satisfied with gmail like many of other kind souls here, and would obviously advice others who want to use those precious moments for something else than going manually through their “spam”..
If you still not using gmail, atleast try it like Darren and others suggested.. and Good luck :)
daretoeatapeach
September 6th, 2008 1:33 pm
I have sought in the last year to overcome clutter and I find that there is just as much of it in my computer as in the physical world. Just because it skips the inbox doesn’t mean that clutter can’t suck time in other ways. You really shouldn’t have to wade through five pages of freecycle offers or laughing squid event lists to find that email your sister sent you a week ago, that’s a sure sign one is keeping stuff they should delete.
If I do a google search of my gmail and find that there it is hard to find what I am looking for because it is mixed in with 200 emails from some overbearing list-serve, I take that as a sign to delete all the old messages in that folder. Then I do the first search again and it is much easier and faster to find what I am looking for. Of course, having these things automatically filtered keeps you from accidentally deleting stuff that might be important.
FrugalNYC
October 15th, 2008 12:34 am
I think the Inbox Zero concept is amazing once you get it. I wrote a post here
http://frugalnyc.blogspot.com/2008/10/inbox-zero-in-three-steps.html
I’ve been doing this for about 2 months now and have been reading about it for several months, posts such as yours and lifehacker, zen habits etc…
Justin Wright
October 27th, 2008 3:24 pm
Spending countless amounts of time on e-mail is something we all have a habit of doing. Just look at a typical day at an office. People spend most of the time in Outlook messing around with e-mails.
These tips are very useful to cut back on time we spend. I just read Tim Ferriss’ book and he also agrees that we spend way to much time with e-mail.
Great tips!
James H
November 15th, 2008 12:14 pm
What a great post! I can’t wait to do this! As always, thanks so much for a great idea =)
James H.
Service is the Action Form of Love
http://serviceafol.blogspot.com
Anthony
January 1st, 2009 3:51 pm
What I have done regards managing my email is that I held more than 4 email account, one email account what I gave to anyone or any website online. I would have one that I only give to people I know like friends, family and business associate. So if a friend sent me an email, I would get it right away and I wouldn’t have to sift through news letter and junk mail…
Graham
January 2nd, 2009 5:16 am
Darren – I have to thank you for this article, and for putting it in your “Best Of” post. Using your technique I also reduced my 10,000 e-mail inbox to ZERO.
I was using Gmail’s filters, but not enough. That’s fixed now. I also archived a huge amount of older mail without applying labels. At least they’re searchable.
So this gets me off to a good start with one of my New Year’s resolutions: To keep my inbox small.
Ginger
March 25th, 2009 6:07 am
I have ruthlessly stopped a lot of my email subscriptions. I totally agree with you. I have a ton of folders and file emails as necessary and delete the rest. Every Dec. 31 and Jan. 1 I go through the files and dump 99.9% of the crap I saved.
My largest email time suck is scrolling through, reading and telling myself I’ll go back and do something with it. When I don’t and it is still hanging there in a week, I dump that with a huge click of the delete button.
While I am better, I am not perfect. I happen to use Yahoo Premium mail. So far, very happy with it though I have a Gmail account.
Yep, the delete button is my friend!
Ginger
Make Money Online
March 29th, 2009 7:20 am
And I am cribbing about around 500 emails in my inbox, lol.
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