Wait… you’re supposed to do this monthly???
…uh oh.
I’ve got 28 years of emails I need to clean up…
At that point it’s an archeological site, not an inbox. I’d almost hate to delete stuff pre-2000 just because it’s a bit of a time capsule into a different era.
28 years of [email]
I thought I had 27 but I only have 26, from Feb 1998 onward.
Just select all and delete it all. If it’s really important they’ll email again.
I’m more of a select all, mark read type of guy, but whatever’s clever
I can only load and select 100 at a time. Every year or so I attempt to tackle it but it’s a sisyphus task.
If you create a rule for a specific email address, you can send it all into a folder, then mark the folder as read. Or, you know, just send all to junk
But what if I need that random e receipt from 6 years ago ???
I try to check my mail every day and delete all that are not necessary to keep. I have rarely failed so miserably at anything else.
I was helping a lady whose data limit was an inch away from being reached and it was all emails. She must have had 200k unread alone.
If she read an email every 15 seconds on average to determine whether it needs to be kept or deleted, it would take her 34 days NON STOP to get through that list of unreads… gotta just nuke and start over
select all click delete
Hell yeah I did it!
Ha, it would probably take me a month to clean up my 10k+ email inbox. Work email though, I refuse to have more than 15 sitting in my inbox.
It takes maybe 2h
there is no spelling error in the title of this post. I love having an edit button.
What spelling error?
Nice fix.
And now I know it’s possible, so no one else has an excuse!
Personal email? Squeaky clean. Work email? I keep all of them for later reference. Currently have 6500. It’d be more of it wasn’t for our 1 year retention policy.
This I don’t get. Your work doesn’t archive emails? There’s been many times I was asked a question I knew came up years ago and thanks to the archive of mails I could answer the question quickly instead of starting from scratch again.
That’s how it was at my old job and I miss it. At my current workplace they only retain mail on the server for 1 year. If you want to retain it longer you have to archive it yourself and I just don’t have the local storage to archive all of my email on my machine like that. (External storage devices also aren’t allowed.)
I haven’t done my five years email cleaning and the weight on my shoulders is unbearable.
Just do it! It shouldn’t take more than 2 hours
Two hours, how? Teach me master!
I had my inbox filled, so I started creating rules
Emails from (let’s say) Google are to be sent to a folder called Google. When creating a rule, it asks you if you want to apply it to the inbox.
Check that, wait for a few minutes, and all Google emails will be inside the new folder. Once you start sorting you will notice that the amount of emails in your inbox reduces drastically.
I created rules that check the email contents for keywords. If it detects ads, then it goes straight to the bin.
Has worked for me for some years.
Is that why people are surprised when they see I have over 6000 unread mails?
You gotta pump those numbers up! I have over 32K emails in my oldest GMail account (I still use it to sign up to things, so my main account can remain “pure” as long as possible) and I’ve read maybe 5% of them.
My inbox hasn’t been clear since 1999
I have my personal inbox set to automatically mark an email as read if it contains the word unsubscribe. It makes managing my email a lot easier
If the email is a month old and I don’t remember what it is about, off to the done folder with it.
If it were truely important, the would have made a ticket about it.
i had over 75K emails in my personal inbox, when i clicked ‘mark all as read’ it was a spiritual orgasm. then i spent an hour clicking on every unsubscribe button i could find. no ragrets.
But what if I NEED one of these emails in ten years?
It hasn’t happened yet, but what if it did?
I just turned off the notification badges for unread emails years ago and it stopped being a problem.
I like to check the first couple email in one of my several email addresses once a year and have never missed anything that i know about
This is easy, CTRL+A, Delete
Problem solved.
