A Gift: How to tame your inbox monsters
The road to a clean mailbox that stays clean.
Reading time: 5 min
If you don’t have the time now to read this and take action to clean your mailbox right away, I suggest that you mark this mail as ‘unread’ and schedule a moment in your calendar to do it. (You won’t regret it!)
Does your inbox feel like it’s full of untamable monsters that vomit unwanted emails your way?
If you’re like me, you sometimes feel like deleting the whole inbox altogether.
The problem is that besides the vomit there are also some precious gems. Things like that email from an old friend, your tickets for that music festival, and the emails from the Curious Bird Project (I hope 😉)
Let me help you tame these vomit monsters.
It can seem daunting (trust me, when I confronted my inbox I almost gave up before starting) but solving this problem is easier than you might think.
We will do it in 3 simple steps (with decreasing importance):
1. Dumping the dump on the dump (making a separate, new dump account)
2. Closing the faucet first (unsubscribing)
3. Cleaning your inbox (deleting unimportant emails)
Let’s get started!
Step 1 – Dumping the dump on the dump.
This first step is a small thing that will save you a lot of work in the future.
It might sound ironic but I want you to make an extra mail account, next to the inbox(es) you truly care about.
This will be your “dump” account. I called mine quintenvoordeckersapps@gmail.com
(A Gmail account is best for this, except if you’re an Apple user who also wants to keep their iCloud mail clean, then you need an extra iCloud account)
As the name suggests, I use it when I have to fill in an email address while installing a new app, or signing in to a new online service.
If you fill in the email address you truly care about, this app or online service will soon be sending A LOT of vomit into your important inbox.
That’s not what we want.
So, make a new Gmail and/or iCloud account and from now on you’ll use that mail address to sign up for new things. You can even use the fast “Continue with Google” or “Continue with Apple” buttons that are often present.
Step 2 – Closing the faucets first!
Now that you’ve made a new habitat for the vomit monsters, you can go to the inbox you truly care about.
There is this saying in Dutch: “Dweilen met de kraan open” which translates as “Mopping while the faucet is still open”. What we want to do is close the faucet before cleaning.
So please, don’t delete incoming emails yet. We’re going to shut up the vomiting monsters first.
That means: unsubscribing from all the mail we don’t need.
To do this efficiently, we want to have an organised overview of all the vomiting monsters filling our inboxes. It would be even better if we can easily see which of them are the biggest ones.
Unfortunately, as far as I know, there isn’t a built-in function to do this in most email providers (in Outlook you can sort by sender, though)
However, there is this thing called “Clean Email”, which is easy to set up and organises your inbox for you. I highly recommend using the free version quickly to get your inbox a bit organised.
https://clean.email (this is not an affiliate link, I just like their free version)
When you’re logged in, click on “View and clean your Inbox”
Click on “Newest on Top” and change it to “Number of messages (High to low)”.
Know you’ll see an organised list of all vomiting monsters with the biggest ones at the top.
WAIT!
I know it is tempting to push the “Trash” button right away. But remember, we want to first close the faucets.
Go back to your inbox and unsubscribe from all the “open faucets” you don’t want to receive emails from anymore. (Hint: it’s probably 99% of them, only the Curious Bird Project is a good fit for remaining in your important inbox :P)
You’ll find that unfortunately, not all of them have the “unsubscribe” button in their emails (look closely, they are often small and almost hidden at the bottom of an email).
Sometimes you’ll have to go to the app/service itself and look in the settings to block it from sending you emails.
Step 3 – Cleaning your inbox
Now that we have made it difficult for new vomiting monsters to enter our important inbox AND we have closed all unwanted open faucets in our important inbox, we can go to the third step:
The cleaning.
I’m convinced this is the most optional step of the three.
If you like a dirty, full inbox… you do you!
If you want a clean inbox, this step is for you.
Remember the vomiting monsters? Their vomit is probably still in your inbox.
If you have done it right, you still have an overview of the vomiting monsters on your Clean Email and you can easily trash them via there.
OR
You can do it via your inbox yourself by filtering them out using the search function.
Then “Select all” and put them in the trash.
Do this for everything and you’ll find a very clean inbox where only precious gems remain 😉
Conclusion
Thank yourself for taking the time to read this and clean your inbox. Most people don’t even make time for that and have to live with the burden of an overflowing inbox.
If you still find it difficult to find the time to do this, stay tuned. Because that’s the goal of this newsletter: Help you waste less time on screens.
And now… Get off your screen a live a little in real life :P
See ya!
Your Curious Bird, Quinten Voordeckers