A Better Email Inbox

I am overburdened with how many emails I receive. Everyday I get more and more email. When I first setup my personal email account I didn’t think about how many mails I would receive and how often I would receive them.

I also sign-up for a lot of products that startups create, many of which become worthless for me to use. I consistently get many emails that I don’t even want to see. The signal to noise ratio of my inbox has become to high to be useful.

Add a Post Fix

The first step in getting your emails to zero is to add a postfix for any new services you sign up for. If you have a Google mail account this is simple to do. All you need to do is append a plus (+) and any text after the email.

Say your email address is John.Doe@gmail.com. Your new email that you would use to sign-up for any service is John.Doe+ads@gmail.com.

In doing this, creating email filters in the future is a breeze. You can setup email filters later on, but for now, make yourself a promise that any new services you sign-up for, you will use this new email address.

Unsubscribing From All the Current Lists

Every time a site asks for your email they are adding you into their distribution list. Who can blame them? You are clearly interested in what they are doing. So, you sign up for the account. After signing up for a few hundred of these, your email becomes out of control.

You need to take back your inbox by unsubscribing from all of these emails.

My process for unsubscribing:

1. Evaluate whether I want to continue receiving emails from this company. (The answer should be 99%, no), and then unsubscribe.
2. Unsubscribe.

There are two ways you can unsubscribe.

1. Unsubscribe Link

Each email you receive has a link at the bottom of the email that says, “unsubscribe.” You can even search for this when looking at an email that has a ton of text.

However, some emails are crafty. They won’t use that language, but the link is still at the bottom. An example is the linkedIn email communications.

You will need to do this for a while, but your efforts will be well worth it. Your email stream will become more valuable to you with every email you do this for.

2. Gmail Unsubscribe

Gmail has a really cool unsubscribe feature. It doesn’t work for some emails, but in my experience it works 50% of the time. At the top of the email, where it has your name, there will be a drop down button. After clicking this, at the bottom is a link to, “Unsubscribe from this sender.”

This is by far the fastest way to unsubscribe.

Relax

This will take a few months of effort, but it will be well worth it. Once finalized you will only receive the emails that you care about. Just put this work flow into your daily email checking and you will begin to see more value in your email box.