How to conquer your email inbox for good

Make organization a part of your daily routine.

It’s very easy to lose control of your email inbox nowadays. The technology behind email is simple, fast, effective, and freely available to businesses and individual users alike.

It is no surprise, then, that the constant sharing of information and ever-growing impatience for responses have caused people to not only be overwhelmed by their inboxes but to also feel guilty about it.

Here are some tips on subduing our email inboxes that I’ve picked up over time, assembled in the form of a chronological checklist.

  1. Ask yourself why you’d like to clear your email
  2. Assess the situation
  3. Start unsubscribing from everything but essentials
  4. Move your “nice-to-haves” to another media channel
  5. Set up a system for the future
  6. Things you can do right now

1. Ask yourself why you’d like to clear your email

Clearing out your emails can sometimes be a daunting task, especially if your inbox has been collecting dust for a while so the email counter is in the hundreds or thousands. That’s why it’s important to establish whether it’s even worth it to start.

Before we do anything, you should ask yourself why you even care. Is it the big red notification badge? Are you looking for a specific email? Is your goal to unsubscribe from newsletters or promotional emails? Are you trying to achieve inbox zero?

Depending on your reasoning, you might even find out that this isn’t truly something you should be spending your time on at the moment. Or there may be an alternative, less-time-consuming solution to your situation. For example:

  • If you find notification badges distracting, and the disorganized emails aren’t otherwise hindering your daily activities, you can simply turn the badges off for that particular application.
  • In case you’d like to unsubscribe from newsletters, you can use the search bar in your inbox to filter out results. Add “from:” and then the email of the sender, followed by “welcome” or “thank you for signing up”. Keep in mind that many newsletters include a small Unsubscribe button at the end of all of their promotional emails.
  • For a sense of relief, you could choose the option to “Select all” emails and then set them as Read. This would give you a clean slate, if you’re not bothered by the disorganization, and you know no important messages were missed.

Now that we’ve gone through some options, if you’d still like to proceed with creating an organized email system, we can move forward with the next steps.

2. Assess the situation

Now you should take a good, hard look at your inbox, and assess the sources of the incoming emails. Try to find the answers to some or all of the following questions:

What kinds of emails are you getting?

  • Are they from humans (friends, family, coworkers)?
  • Are they work-related or personal?
  • Are they not from humans (i.e, newsletters or promotional)?
  • Are they important or junk emails?

What is the general email timeline?

  • When was the last email you received? Within the last day? Week?
  • How often do you receive emails? You can check this in your device settings.
    • iOS/iPadOS: Settings > Screen Time > See All Activity and scroll down to Notifications
    • Mac: System Preferences > Screen Time > Notifications
    • Android: Settings > Digital Wellbeing & parental controls
  • Are your emails being accumulated during a particular time of the day (work) or are they scattered throughout the day?
  • When was the last time you’ve done a thorough swipe-through of your inbox?

Now you should take a piece of paper (or a digital version of that) and write down all senders that you’re interested in or care about. It could be people, businesses and/or subscriptions you would like to continue receiving updates from. A good rule-of-thumb is to try to name these at the top of your head, without looking through your emails. If they’re not important enough to remember on the spot, they don’t belong in this category.

Once you’ve made a list, create another column next to it, and write down the senders that it is essential to receive emails from. “Essential” meaning that you would experience significant negative consequences if you missed them. For example, work-related correspondence, emails from your child’s daycare, or tax office updates.

At this point, you should have a two-column list similar to this:

Fun for meEssentials
Dominos Tax office
Tom’s HardwareDentist
The EconomistPayPal
Tech Crunch
Dribbble

3. Start unsubscribing from everything but the essentials

It’s time to start unsubscribing from all emails aside from the ones on the “Essential” list. This is both the most tedious and the most rewarding part.

You might also wonder, “Why just the Essentials? What about the other emails I’m interested in?”

The goal here is to take control of your email list, and the first step to achieving that is re-establishing the main goal of emails – correspondence and information transfer in a quick and efficient way. If your inbox is actively hindering your ability to navigate what’s important – it’s time to make a change and go back to the bare minimum in order to regain that usefulness.

This process is most likely going to cause you to worry a bit or experience FOMO (fear of missing out). Businesses thrive off of email members feeling like they’re going to miss out on a big sale or important information. It’s an entire business model.

But I’m here to remind and reassure you that most of the things you miss out on will not be essential (as we defined it previously). You can happily miss out on other people’s priorities.

This way you’ll know that if you get an email, it’s most likely going to be important. You won’t have to go digging through your inbox to find the important stuff because your emails are the important stuff.

How to unsubscribe

Most newsletters and marketing emails have some version of an “Unsubscribe” button, usually located in the footer. Businesses cleverly hide this option in order to make it more tedious for users to find it.

Some email providers, like Gmail, offer the option to unsubscribe next to the sender’s address, before the email even starts.

In order to find all websites and services you’re subscribed to, you can search up keywords for sign-up, confirmation or similar account-related emails. These include but aren’t limited to:

  • “Welcome”
  • “Email confirmation” / “Confirm your email”
  • “Just one last step”
  • “To make sure it’s you”
  • “Password reset” / “Reset your password”
  • “Thank you for signing up”

The process of finding senders and unsubscribing can take days, weeks, or even months to complete, simply because of how some services will inevitably slip through the cracks.

As satisfying as cleaning everything out in one swoop would be, you have to remember that it’s probably taken a long time for everything to start accumulating, so you have to take a significant time mending it.

There are some services that offer to do this process for you, but I have not used them myself and therefore cannot recommend them. One thing to be careful about, however, is that you would have to give up your email account details (email/password) as well as passwords to other accounts so they could do this process for you. This poses a security and privacy risk, and it’s something to keep in mind if you end up considering using them. In my opinion, it’s better to do it yourself slowly over time.

4. Move your “nice-to-haves” to another media channel

Once you’ve unsubscribed from all non-essential emails, you can start sorting through the rest, in other words, fun “nice-to-haves” and deciding how you want to deal with them.

Here are some options.

RSS feeds

My first recommendation is to get an RSS feed for as many websites as you can get. RSS is essentially an aggregator of all posted content, and the benefit here is that you get updates without cluttering your email inbox, or getting distracted thinking it’s an emergency. So, you can enjoy your content at your own pace without being overwhelmed by it.

There are many different RSS readers out there, and most are pretty good. Out of the ones I’ve tried, these get my recommendation:

By replacing your email subscriptions with an RSS feed, you’ll have an aggregate of content you care about at your convenience, but it won’t bury essential emails that actually need your focus and attention.

Separate emails

Most people nowadays have more than one email, or rather, some combination of personal, work/school and spam addresses. I recommend you at least have two, and ideally three or more emails.

Firstly, because by having multiple addresses, things can be and stay more organized. Work-related correspondence won’t mix with your Saturday order-ins or party invitations, and vice versa.

Secondly, this method also provides an extra bonus of privacy. Your personal stuff can stay personal. Your employer does not need to know how often you go to the dentist or doctor, or if you’re planning on having a child soon or not.

Once you’ve created multiple emails, you have to stick with them. It’s very easy to give up on being organized when the busyness or laziness kick in. Resist the convenience of mixing these emails.

Email aliases

Email aliases are basically multiple “side” email addresses that all forward emails back to a main address. Creating email aliases is a great way of dealing with temporary subscriptions, as well as making the process of opting out of emails stress-free. Allow me to illustrate my point.

Let’s say you’re interested in this month’s updates from a travel company since you’re planning a vacation. But once the summer is over, you’ll no longer be interested in their promotions. Instead of dealing with having to unsubscribe from their emails, and then trying to get yourself off their mailing list (which most people don’t do, hence email accumulation), you can simply deactivate the specific alias for this travel company.

The result is two-fold: you will no longer receive any updates from this company until you re-activate the alias, and the company will not have your real email in their database.

Image courtesy of SimpleLogin.io

There are several aliasing tools you can use:

Setting up aliases is a very simple process, much like setting up any other account. You’ll simply add your primary (personal/spam) address and create an account in either SimpleLogin or AnonAddy, and then click “Create Alias”.

Note: As of April 2022, you can sign up to SimpleLogin with a ProtonMail account.

Once the alias is created, all of the emails that are sent to this particular alias address will be forwarded back to your mail email address, so you won’t miss out on anything.

To keep a better track of your emails in the future, consider naming aliases according to the website you’re subscribing to. For example, if you’d like to sign up for a newsletter on dog treats, name the alias something like: DogTreatsCompany@aliasingcompany.com.

5. Setting up a system for the future

All of the steps thus far should’ve created a solid basis for keeping an organized email set-up. However, we need to define a system for not letting the incoming mail pile up or get overwhelming.

Create flairs, labels and folders

Most email providers offer some form of labels or folders you can create and assign to incoming mail, either automatically or manually. Use these generously.

To give you an example, my personal ProtonMail address has 9 labels and 4 folders (one of these folders has 8 sub-folders). I also have a Tutanota account with 2 folders for specific purposes. These features exist to help you out, so make use of them.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

  • Labels: Important, Documents, Useful, Fun, Links, University/Work
  • Folders: See Later, University/Work, Applications, Recipes

You can assign these labels and folders manually yourself or automatically via inbox rules (discussed below).

If you decide to do it manually, you need to be thorough and consistent about it. You need to get into the habit of assigning labels on emails that you want to come back to later.

Set up inbox rules

Inbox rules are automatic actions you assign to your inbox. Different email providers have different names for them, but they all work the same. You can customize rules for specific senders, keywords or types of emails.

For instance, when I was looking for a job, I set up an inbox rule that sends all emails from @teamtailor.com addresses into my “Job applications” folder, since most of the applications were using that company’s ATS. That way, my main inbox wasn’t getting overcrowded by an influx of automatic responses and recruiting emails.

Another thing you can do is set up a rule where any email with a certain keyword in the subject line or body gets set to Read or is tagged with a label. This is how I organize inspirational content at work, as well as clear out senders I want to hear from occasionally.

Every email provider has their own way of creating filters, so try to look up the specifics for the one you’re using. Here is how to do it in Gmail:

  1. Type the identifier you’d like to make a filter for in the search bar. This could be sender email, keyword, attachment type, or something else.
  2. Click “Create filter” (See image beow)
  3. Choose the action you’d like to apply for this identifier. The example below shows that every email containing the word “Inspiration” will be assigned the Inspiration and ideas label. But you could also archive the email automatically, set it to Read, forward it, delete it, and a number of other things.

Start using a password manager

A password manager is a software that users can store and manage their passwords and other login information with. Therefore you, as a user, only need to remember one master password instead of multiple ones.

You’ve probably already come across a password manager at some point, or maybe you’re even using one, but they’re very useful tools for managing your email clutter, along with email aliases.

By storing all your log-in info in one place, you have an ability to access any website easily, and, consequently, to unsubscribe from their mailing list or even delete your accounts altogether.

A password manager I recommend is Bitwarden, since it’s free, end-to-end encrypted and open-source.

Configure swipe gestures in mobile email apps

Most email providers allow you to assign actions to specific swipe gestures on their mobile apps. Swipe actions are quick and efficient, and they’ll help you get through your daily batch of emails with much less hassle.

They’re usually buried somewhere in the app settings (or in Apple’s case, device settings), so try digging through your app of choice for this option.

  • ProtonMail: Click ☰ > Settings > Swipe actions
  • Apple Mail: Device settings > Mail > Swipe options
  • Gmail: Click ☰ > Settings > Email swipe actions
  • Outlook: Click ☰ > Settings (Gear symbol) > Swipe options

What you assign to each gesture is up to you because it’ll depend on your personal use, but I’d suggest to set at least one of them to Delete or Mark as Read as those are crucial for clearing out the inbox.

Take advantage of automation

We’ve already seen some of the benefits of automating with inbox rules, but now we’re going to broaden up and introduce some advanced automation software.

If you have an Apple device, you could look into some Apple Shortcuts to cut down time you spend on managing your inbox. While not ideal, the app is free and can work quite well in some cases, especially for small tasks.

These two are email-related shortcuts and automation I use every day, which will hopefully help you too:

  • Do Not Disturb during off-work hours (automation that turns on when the clock ticks 16:30, and is active until 08:00 next day): It helps me take back some of my attention and not be bothered by endless chains of email.
    • To create this automation, follow the steps below. There is also a short clip at the bottom showing all the steps.
      1. Download and open the Shortcuts app on your iPhone or iPad
      2. Choose the Automation section from the menu.
      3. Click the plus (+) sign, and then Create Personal Automation.
      4. Choose Time of Day, set the time when your workday ends, and set to Repeat Daily. Click Next.
      5. Click Add Action.
      6. Type Set Focus in the search bar, and click on the icon with that name.
      7. Set it to “Turn Do Not Disturb On until Time [insert time when your workday ends]“. Click Next.
      8. Deselect Ask Before Running (it should be gray not green). Click Don’t Ask in the pop up.
      9. Click Done.
How to set up the Do Not Disturb automation
  • Email schedule to yourself (emails all calendar events for the day with custom text): I find it helpful when I’m planning out my tasks at the beginning of a workday.

Another alternative is Zapier, which is a highly adaptable automation software with thousands of integrations. The price matches the service, however, and the free tier is quite limited compared to the paid version, but it might be worth it depending on who you are and what you’re using your email for.

There are many ways you can use Zapier for email automation. Here are some ideas:

These are just some of the ways we can use automation to our advantage when dealing with our inbox. If you’re a busy person that doesn’t have much time or energy to deal with their email deluge, this is a great option for you.

6. Start small, but immediately

If you’ve gotten this far in and are feeling overwhelmed by the amount of information presented in this article, here’s what you can do right now to make an immediate impact:

  1. Set up an email label that sets all emails sending you promotional material as Read.
  2. Set up the Do Not Disturb automation to stop getting pinged outside of your work hours, or just in general.
  3. Set up email aliases and use them to filter out emails before they even enter your inbox.

These three steps should take less than 15 minutes in total, and are a significant start.

And finally, remember that this is a marathon, not a sprint. Good luck!

Published by S.E.

I am a designer of interactive media, an educator and a big tech enthusiast. The articles I share with the world are a product of my education, heavy research and passion.

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