Remember those old answering machines that would announce the number of messages you had before they were played? Thank goodness our email inboxes don’t do the same! Imagine opening your laptop at a coffee shop to get some work done and hearing, “You have 6,276 new messages.” Don’t act surprised by that number either. It is easy to become overwhelmed by the mail in your mailbox. A month of avoiding all but the most important emails could easily result in over 3,000 unread email messages for the typical user. There are some ways to handle email that will significantly cut down this number.
Everyone Needs Filters
Learning to use your email’s built-in filters can be a lifesaver. By taking the time to create a filter for specific types of email, those that you don’t need can build up somewhere other than the space on the screen that you have to see. For example, your favorite store might send out several emails a week with advertisements about their current sales. You want to keep receiving them, but do not want to see them every day. First you filter all mail from that store to a folder labeled with that store’s name, and check for the ability to have filtered email “skip the inbox.” This way, you can find it when you need to know what the latest sales look like, but you do not have to see it on days you won’t use it.
This can be done for any type of email. Someone who likes to send photos to their email instead of keeping them on the cell phone camera may choose to filter out any photo messages from their phone number to a label called “Cell Pics.” When they next check their email, the pictures will be accessible without cluttering the inbox.
Trust the Search Bar
Just because you do not have it in your inbox, does not mean that it is lost. The search features on most email programs are pretty comprehensive these days. Not only can an email user search for keywords, but you can also instruct the search to include only emails with attachments or only sent from a certain address. This helps by eliminating your need for keeping items in the inbox. If you have email in your inbox that is more than 30 days old, it should be “archived” immediately. This means asking your email provider to file it away for now and bring it back at your command later.
Unsubscribe
Do you constantly see the name of a specific company on email that you never read? Sometimes you get signed up by entering a contest. Or, you could buy one thing at a certain store and they begin sending newsletters every week. Whatever the case may be, every email you receive from a business has a link on the bottom that gives you the option to unsubscribe. Take the five seconds to make use of that button once a day and your junk email will begin to slowly disappear.
These three tips work best if they are implemented on a regular basis. Do not try to do all of this in one day. It took a long time to build up your pile of email. Take a few weeks to work on the labels, a couple per day.
