Sort Email by Sender Before Emptying Your Inbox
There are many methods to try in the never-ending search for ways to sort and reduce the volume of our bloated inboxes. But they all have one thing in common: they rely on a chronology of each email’s arrival . Let’s try turning this approach on its head and instead sort messages by sender to make sense of the mess.
Why you should sort your inbox by sender
When clearing messages, you probably stick to some kind of organizational system, such as 4Ds . You go through and decide what to delete, do, delegate, or put aside, but recognizing patterns isn’t that hard if you just start at the top and work your way down. Sort your inbox by sender to help you see which (or which) messages you receive the most. If it’s a newsletter or mailing list, you can delete them all at once, but if it’s a specific person at work, you might get a signal that they need a response from you.
So instead of deleting or delegating emails one by one, you can try destroying or processing entire batches from specific senders to speed up the sorting process.
How to sort by sender in Gmail
In Gmail, if you’ve already found a message from an individual or business whose emails you want to merge, you can right-click it in your inbox and click Find Emails From. This will take you to an inbox containing only messages from that sender. You can also access this mailbox by typing “from: [their email address]” in the search bar or clicking the advanced search button and entering the user’s name in the “From” field.
Unfortunately, you can’t sort your entire Gmail inbox by sender and can instead create batches just by sender, but it still helps to group them together.
How to sort by sender in Outlook
Outlook is better than Gmail for this method. In fact, it allows you to sort your entire inbox not only by sender, but also by other recipients, size, etc.
At the top of your inbox, click Filter, then Sort By. Depending on which version you’re using, you may have to go to the View tab and click From in the Arrange group.
Messages will be grouped in your inbox by sender, making them easy to group and delete.