Conquering the E-mail Monster

Dear Friends,

It feels so good to be writing to you again. I apologize for how long it’s been.

I should probably confess that during the winter months I tend to get a steady stream of migraines, to the point that coherent thoughts are sometimes difficult, much less putting them into writing. That’s why there’s often a three or four month gap in posts on here, which I will try to find some solution to before next winter rolls around (we’re hoping to be back south by next winter, which should help).

I have one more apology to make. Somehow (I have no idea how), my Delicious.com stream of bookmarks and my SUComments.com posts became connected on my RSS feed. I’ve been trying to figure out how to fix it, with nothing working so far. I will be working on it more today. Edit Yayyyyy I fixed it! No more delicious posts going out over my feed.

And now on to the topic at hand:

Because I hibernate during the winter, things have a tendency to pile up. Take for instance, my e-mail inbox.

When I finally looked at it last week with plans to clean it out, I was shocked to discover around 10,000 e-mails piled up and waiting for me to handle them. Even worse, clicking on All Mail showed me that previous springs I’d just archived the monster instead of doing anything about it (nearly 30,000 messages hiding there).

Although I still had plenty of storage space on my gmail account, the idea of having that many unnecessary messages bugged me, so I decided to do something about it. That’s when I discovered “Filter messages like these” in the “More actions” drop down menu.

Before I’d only used the “Create a filter” link located beside the search box. It works well, but is time consuming since you have to add each thing you want to filter by hand (or copy and paste).

Using the drop down option made cleaning out my mail a breeze.

First, I removed almost all of my old filters. Most weren’t actually helping, they were just moving the messages to the side so I could see the new ones coming in.

Second, I created 3 new filters, knowing I’d probably add a few more as I went along. The three I started with are Clean out every Thursday, Needs Action, and Reference.

Here’s where the Filter drop down option came in very handy. Starting with the first e-mail in my inbox, I decided

1) if I wanted to continue getting e-mails from that company, and

2) How important were those e-mails.

If I wanted to continue getting the e-mails, I would put click on the check box for that e-mail in the inbox without opening the message, and then select “Filter messages like these.” Gmail would then show how many messages from that source I’d received, and I could choose to have all those I’d received, plus any new ones skip the inbox and go to whichever folder fit.

Next, I discovered one of my favorite uses for the Filter option. When I’d find a message that I didn’t need to keep, I could filter all of that type, and then choose Trash.

After I had trashed those e-mails, I could then delete the filter if I wanted, and the messages I’d sent to the trash would stay there. This helped keep my filter list from becoming gigantic.

One last thing helped to keep my filter list reasonable. I soon discovered that I could select several different messages that I wanted to use the same filter with and the filter I created would include all of them. I believe the limit is 25 different addresses to include, which can make filtering go much faster.

Finally, after I had deleted all but 400 messages from my inbox, I clicked on the “All Mail” tab and began looking for any messages that didn’t have a label, sorting them the same way I had the others.

I have to say, for the first time in a few years, my e-mail is actually organized…and in such a way that it should be easy to find anything I need.

Now to see if I can keep it that way!