How to Clear a Crowded Gmail Inbox (Manually)
There comes a time when enough is quite simple. I’ve been putting off the task of organizing my vast Gmail inbox for months, if not years. But when Lifehacker told me that we were going to have a week of spring cleaning, I knew it was time. And I was not going to waste precious hours trying to find applications or tools to do this task for me. I had tosend my mailboxto Ron Swenson – roll up my sleeves, jump in and sort out the mess by hand.
At Lifehacker, we take spring cleaning very seriously. We are far from missing out on an opportunity to refresh, reorganize and streamline our home life. We’re also very excited to hit the reset button with our technology, take a close look at our finances, and get the better of our day-to-day habits that have gotten a little musty. Welcome to Spring Cleaning Week as we clear away the winter cobwebs and set the stage for the sunny days ahead. Let’s clean up, okay?
Assessing your messy inbox
Since you (probably) use your inbox every day, you probably have a pretty good idea of what kind of emails you receive and from whom on a regular basis. You know which mailings you’ve signed up for, which messages you receive, which have a higher priority than others (perhaps even more so than Google’s algorithms can figure out), which marketing emails you like, and which regular emails hesitate to edge of spam because you get so many of them so often.
Gmail doesn’t have a great way to quickly find out which email addresses are sending you the most emails, and I haven’t found a suitable extension or trick for that either. But this does not require a special solution. You probably already know. And if you don’t, it’s not that hard to find out.
For example, take a quick look at your inbox – it’s easier if you’re using the default Gmail inbox with five tabs at the top – and see if there are senders or topics that are popping up more often than they should. Your bank may be sending you a message once a day about new accounts you can open, in addition to the notification emails you receive every time you transfer money between accounts. Maybe you buy a lot on Amazon. Perhaps Facebook pings you every time someone you know does something. The concert that you once saw in this hall? You may have received tons of emails from the venue (or Ticketmaster, or AXS, etc.)
You can also figure out who is blowing up your inbox by doing a few simple searches. One of my most used Gmail queries is “from:” followed by a company or friend, and sometimes an email address. (Also good: “from: [name] is: unread” to really see if someone is sending you a lot of things that you aren’t looking at.)
Start unsubscribe
When you start figuring out who is blasting you with a ton of email – which you’ll likely find under the Promotions tab of Gmail if you’re using it – you have a great opportunity to completely clear your inbox. Going forward, the process is much easier.
Receive emails from your more active senders, and if you find that you don’t read a lot of their messages, look in the email for an unsubscribe link – if one exists. If you cannot find it, feel free to report messages as spam. While it may take a while if you are receiving a lot of emails, it is a great way to cut that stream down to a trickle.
Google’s default mailbox automatically tries to filter marketing messages from your main inbox to a separate promotions tab, but it also helps you forget about managing your mail. Don’t overlook your email – at the very least, you’re missing out on valuable marketing emails that you really care about because you’re flooded with ones you’ve never read.
Labels: Keys to the Perfect Mailbox
It took me ages to get used to Gmail’s labeling system. Yes I know; these are basically folders for your email, just not because something can exist in multiple labels (and in your inbox) at the same time. Because they are shortcuts. Not really folders. I understand.
I still don’t manually tag emails by dragging the label from the far left sidebar of Gmail onto the email in question, using the dropdown button (which looks like a luggage tag), or by dragging the email itself into a non-folder shortcut on the main Gmail screen. I recommend that you try any of these methods; they are not for me – at least not by hand. More on this later.
- Resist the urge to create a million labels
When I played around with labels, I found myself making my life difficult by being too accurate. For some, it works; I’ve seen co-workers have a dedicated “VIP” mailbox for every member of their team, every manager they have, and every super important colleague they work with cross-functional. When you receive an absurd number of emails every day, I think this is a great way to make sure you never miss a message from important people. This is something worth considering on Gmail if you are inclined towards it.
Instead, I use multiple shortcuts to capture important topics that I care about. For example, I have a Daily Email label for frequent emails that I should be interested in. I use the News and Theater sub-labels in Daily Email to keep track of daily posts and updates from the various news organizations I subscribe to and several theatrical newsletters I participate in in my area. (Each listserv is configured to automatically send me a batch digest of daily messages, otherwise I would probably have separate sub-labels for each.)
I have a simple Finance label that I use for everything related to money, including account updates at my banks, marketing messages from my banks, any messages from various credit card companies that like to deny me, and dumping a playground for sites like Nerdwallet, Slickdeals and AwardWallet to name just a few.
The only email shortcut that I pay a lot of attention to is my “_important” shortcut, named to move to the top of my shortcut list. Inside, I have sub-labels for all emails sent from my roommates without exception (usually about planning an upcoming event or yelling at me over meals); extra shortcut for emails sent by my girlfriend (ditto); and an additional red “_to do” label that I use to keep track of any urgent tasks I need.
The last label – “_ shipping” is my universal mark for anything from Amazon, UPS, FedEx or USPS. If he ever comes to my house, he will appear on delivery. And it’s nice to see a little (1) pop up in the morning, which usually means something awesome is coming soon, if not on that day.
- Organizing your labels
One of the most useful features of Gmail is the ability to show and hide labels as needed. This allows you to archive old shortcuts if you used them to track a project that ended some time ago; it also allows shortcuts to “appear” in the left sidebar of Gmail whenever you have something to look at (which I find incredibly useful in getting my attention).
To customize the visibility of shortcuts, open the Gmail settings menu by clicking the gear icon in the upper right corner of the main window and selecting Settings. From there click on “Shortcuts”. The screen that appears next looks intimidating at first, but it’s the best way to keep your inbox from cluttering up with labels.
For example, you can hide system shortcuts like “chat” or “spam” if you know you’re never going to go through them. You can also hide all Gmail categories that are already showing at the top of the main window in the default Gmail view.
Show or hide the shortcuts you create, or if you want to take a dynamic approach, customize them to show in the sidebar only if you have unread messages. This is a bit of a lie, though, as you can also access any placemark you create by clicking the More button at the bottom of the placemark list in the sidebar. These smaller labels won’t show up more prominently unless you have a post to look at.
Let Gmail do your labels for you
Labels are great and all, but if you have a fairly large volume of incoming email that you have to deal with on a daily basis, the process of organizing it all can seem daunting. Pair your labels with some creative Gmail filters, however, and your inbox will automatically sort itself on your behalf. While filtering your Gmail may seem a little daunting and take a little time to fix, it’s a process that pays off in the long run.
- Setting up your first filters
The easiest way to create a Gmail filter is to click on an email and let Gmail create a filter based on its settings. So, if your favorite sandwich shop is bombarding you with emails every single day, but you want to make sure you catch them (for those sweet sandwiches), open the email, click the More button under the Gmail search bar, and select the Filter Similar Messages Option “.
- Adjusting the filter to make it more accurate
When you let Gmail define message filtering, the service can classify the email by its “list” rather than the sender’s email address. This should work for most marketing messages, but you can also remove this and use wildcards in the “from” field, such as *@nameofsandwichplace.com, to ensure that the filter catches every single message the company sends you.
To continue with this example, if your establishment starts sending its emails from addresses that use many subdomains, you cannot use multiple wildcards. So typing * @ * sandwich * in the from field won’t find everything. However, you can use vertical stripes – shift-backslash – to add additional entries to the filter. So in this case you can write *@sandwichplace.com | *@marketing.sandwichplace.com | *@yum.sandwichplace.com in the From field to capture multiple incoming emails from the same company.
You can also try using the generic type: input from: Starbucks should find whatever the coffee maker sends you. You will only need to clarify if you are trying to filter out some messages and others not. For example, if you want posts from a certain theater company to receive one label rather than all posts about all theaters (or theater in general) – or, if you’re not art -savvy , posts from a certain Jim (from New Hamp-Shire Darkmagics ) instead of all the Jims.
- Why filters should be crazy
You can get incredibly creative with Gmail filtering, even blocking your inbox completely from email accounts you haven’t yet whitelisted. This is extreme, but possible. (You can even use Gmail to create an unlimited number of email addresses and filter this by giving your banks, for example, youremail+finance@gmail.com, and filtering all Gmail messages based on the To: field instead of the From:”.)
It’s easier for me to follow a simple rule: if I have a shortcut, I must have a filter. So, in my case, I have a filter configured to flag any email I send to myself as “Case,” mark the email with an asterisk and mark it as important – a convenient way to send myself a reminder of everything via email. My financial filter looks a little more unmanageable, but it works: from: (* @ chase.com | *@e.chase.com | *@alertsp.chase.com | *@service.capitalone.com | * @ capitalone. Com | *@notification.capitalone.com | *@mint.com | *@awardwallet.com)
- You can also get creative with filter actions
The other important half of the filtering process is all the other actions you can play with after setting up your triggers. It’s easy to tell Gmail to tag a specific email from a specific sender. To keep your main inbox (and categorical tabs, if you use them) free of clutter, consider telling Gmail that you also want those filtered emails to bypass your inbox.
This does not mean that you will not be able to read these messages or notice them when you receive them. Instead, this auto-skip feature means your main inbox won’t be jammed with emails from your favorite sandwich shop; instead, you will see a growing number of sandwich filters warning you that there are messages you should look at. I find this much easier to manage than having an inbox full of emails with color filters, and it works a little more than the old “Create Rule” feature in Outlook or Mail that you are probably more familiar with.