When Cleaning Out Your Inbox, Try Sorting Emails by Sender.
There are many methods to try in the endless search for a way to organize and reduce the number of emails in your overflowing inbox. They’re varied enough that you’re sure to find one that works perfectly for you, but they all have one thing in common: they rely on the chronology of each email’s arrival . Let’s try turning this approach on its head and instead sorting emails by sender to cut through the clutter.
Why you should sort your incoming messages by sender
When deleting messages, you probably use some kind of organizational system, such as the 4D method . You review messages and decide what to delete, do, delegate, or postpone—but if you start at the top and work your way down, it can be difficult to recognize patterns. Daily tasks or requests may look different depending on what you’re currently doing.
Sorting your inbox by sender, rather than by date received, will help you see whose (or what) messages you receive most often. If it’s a newsletter or mailing list, you can delete all messages at once, but if it’s messages from a specific person at work, you might get a signal that they need a response from you. You can then prioritize their messages, for example, by adding them to your favorites or paying special attention to new correspondence from them, since you know their messages are more important than others. Even if you use “one- or two-tap” methods , which involve opening each message immediately upon receipt, this can be helpful because you’ll sense a sense of urgency about specific senders once you identify patterns.
So, instead of deleting or sorting emails one by one, you can try deleting entire batches of emails from specific senders or processing them in bulk to speed up the sorting process.
How to sort email by sender in Gmail
In Gmail, if you’ve already found a message from a person or organization whose emails you want to consolidate into a single folder, you can right-click it in your inbox and select “Find Messages From.” This will open an inbox containing only messages from that sender. You can also access this folder by entering “from:[their email address]” in the search bar or by clicking the advanced search button and entering the sender’s name in the “From” field.
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Unfortunately, you can’t sort your entire Gmail inbox by sender and can instead create groups of emails by sender only, but it still helps organize emails into groups.
How to sort by sender in Outlook
Outlook is better suited for this method than Gmail. Moreover, it allows you to sort your entire inbox not only by sender, but also by other recipients, size, and other parameters.
At the top of the inbox window, click “Filter,” then “Sort by.” Depending on your version, you may need to go to the “View” tab and click “From” in the “Location” group.
Your Inbox will organize emails by sender, making it easy to merge and delete them.