Quickly Trim Down an Overflowing Email Inbox

Man in pile of emails

Here’s a quick tip I’ve found to rapidly trim down my email inbox and slow down my rate of new emails at the same time. It’s a simple three step process:

  1. Find an email you identify as junk. For example, I created a Pinterest account and started receiving spam from them automatically.
  2. Search for an unsubscribe link or navigate to the site to unsubscribe from all emails.
  3. In the email, look for a common “to” or “from” field. For example, the Pinterest emails were coming from “pinbot@inspire.pinterest.com”. Now search for “from:pinbot@inspire.pinterest.com”, do a quick scan to verify all emails in search list look like junk, select all, then delete all the emails, not just the single email.

By doing this my delete or archive actions have a multiplying effect so I don’t waste time making the same decision for similar emails over and over again. Rinse and repeat until I can’t find any repeating emails. I’ve found I can quickly trim down my neglected inbox to a small fraction of what it was before, giving me more time to focus on the important emails.

Leave a Reply