If you're anything like me, you'll have piles of messages that have been accumulating in your inbox: receipts, bank and credit card statements, mobile phone bills, plane tickets, restaurant bookings, reminders, security warnings, spam and more.
Mixed in with all that administrative detritus might be some personal missives from friends and family that are worth keeping.
There are several reasons to purge all that digital clutter. For one, it cuts the risk in case of a data breach. If hackers somehow gain access to your email, they won't have any personal or financial info like credit card details to pilfer.
A decluttered inbox also helps boost productivity and focus because it's easier to find important messages if you don't have to sift through reams of irrelevant ones.
Some productivity proponents advocate inbox zero, a practice that requires dealing with each email that comes in so that by the end of the day your inbox is empty.
But who has the time and energy for that? If you're busy, it's easier to just deal with the messages that need immediate attention and ignore the rest. That is, until the backlog becomes too big.
Here are some tricks to tame your inbox by culling unwanted emails from important ones:
DITCH THE ATTACHMENTS
Email accounts used to have limited storage space, say a gigabyte or two at most, which meant that messages with big attachments took up lots of space. Nowadays, email comes with plenty of free storage but it's still good practice to clear out oversized messages because they tend to build up over time. Do you really need to keep all those high-resolution photos of a forgotten friend's grandchildren?
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1400077361/1736984268/articles/mlLW2pP8d1737098105493/p_fD1K3gh1737098232887.jpg]
In Microsoft Outlook, click on the “Size” column or button to float the biggest messages to the top, where you can go through and delete them. Outlook also lets users sort by attachment so that messages with added files show at the top. If you want to save the message itself, right click on the attachment to remove it.
In Gmail, go to the search settings to filter out messages that are “greater than” a certain size. Start at, say, 20 megabytes, and then gradually reduce the number.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1400077361/1736984268/articles/mlLW2pP8d1737098105493/VHQ9iYn_Q1737098235734.jpg]
SORT IT
Emails from frequent automated senders, such as newsletters and mailing lists, can take up a lot of space in your inbox. Or perhaps you get a lot of security notifications from your bank that might be important in the moment but quickly become outdated.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1400077361/1736984268/articles/mlLW2pP8d1737098105493/XMO81sYMq1737098239254.jpg]
It's often too tedious to delete them individually so filter your inbox by sender to delete them as a group. In Outlook click the “From” column or button. In Gmail or Yahoo mail, use the search bar to look for the sender’s email address.
Combine this with another search trick that narrows down the date range to filter out all those old ema...
Mixed in with all that administrative detritus might be some personal missives from friends and family that are worth keeping.
There are several reasons to purge all that digital clutter. For one, it cuts the risk in case of a data breach. If hackers somehow gain access to your email, they won't have any personal or financial info like credit card details to pilfer.
A decluttered inbox also helps boost productivity and focus because it's easier to find important messages if you don't have to sift through reams of irrelevant ones.
Some productivity proponents advocate inbox zero, a practice that requires dealing with each email that comes in so that by the end of the day your inbox is empty.
But who has the time and energy for that? If you're busy, it's easier to just deal with the messages that need immediate attention and ignore the rest. That is, until the backlog becomes too big.
Here are some tricks to tame your inbox by culling unwanted emails from important ones:
DITCH THE ATTACHMENTS
Email accounts used to have limited storage space, say a gigabyte or two at most, which meant that messages with big attachments took up lots of space. Nowadays, email comes with plenty of free storage but it's still good practice to clear out oversized messages because they tend to build up over time. Do you really need to keep all those high-resolution photos of a forgotten friend's grandchildren?
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1400077361/1736984268/articles/mlLW2pP8d1737098105493/p_fD1K3gh1737098232887.jpg]
In Microsoft Outlook, click on the “Size” column or button to float the biggest messages to the top, where you can go through and delete them. Outlook also lets users sort by attachment so that messages with added files show at the top. If you want to save the message itself, right click on the attachment to remove it.
In Gmail, go to the search settings to filter out messages that are “greater than” a certain size. Start at, say, 20 megabytes, and then gradually reduce the number.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1400077361/1736984268/articles/mlLW2pP8d1737098105493/VHQ9iYn_Q1737098235734.jpg]
SORT IT
Emails from frequent automated senders, such as newsletters and mailing lists, can take up a lot of space in your inbox. Or perhaps you get a lot of security notifications from your bank that might be important in the moment but quickly become outdated.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1400077361/1736984268/articles/mlLW2pP8d1737098105493/XMO81sYMq1737098239254.jpg]
It's often too tedious to delete them individually so filter your inbox by sender to delete them as a group. In Outlook click the “From” column or button. In Gmail or Yahoo mail, use the search bar to look for the sender’s email address.
Combine this with another search trick that narrows down the date range to filter out all those old ema...
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Apple(Digital) - 1 Issue, January 17, 2025