Fri | Jan 10, 2025

Tips on clearing out your inbox for the new year

Published:Friday | January 10, 2025 | 12:09 AM
Start the new year with a clean slate by decluttering your inbox.
Start the new year with a clean slate by decluttering your inbox.

LONDON (AP):

The new year is always a good time to make a fresh start — including with your email inbox. To kick off 2025 with a clean slate, why not clear out all those unnecessary and unwanted messages?

There are several reasons to purge all that digital clutter. For one, it cuts the risk in case of a data breach. If hackers somehow gain access to your email, they won’t have any personal or financial info like credit card details to pilfer.

A decluttered inbox also helps boost productivity and focus because it’s easier to find important messages if you don’t have to sift through reams of irrelevant ones.

Here are some tricks to tame your inbox by culling unwanted emails from important ones:

DITCH THE ATTACHMENTS

Email accounts used to have limited storage space, say a gigabyte or two at most, which meant that messages with big attachments took up lots of space. Nowadays, email comes with plenty of free storage but it’s still good practice to clear out oversized messages because they tend to build up over time.

SORT IT

Emails from frequent automated senders, such as newsletters and mailing lists, can take up a lot of space in your inbox. Or perhaps you get a lot of security notifications from your bank that might be important in the moment but quickly become outdated.

It’s often too tedious to delete them individually so filter your inbox by sender to delete them as a group. In Outlook click the ‘From’ column or button. In Gmail or Yahoo mail, use the search bar to look for the sender’s email address.

KEYWORDS

Emails from mailing lists tend to include certain words or language that makes it a bit easier to filter them out. One such obvious term is “unsubscribe”. Searching for a word like that, which wouldn’t normally be used in emails written by humans, will identify all the newsletters for easy deletion.

CARBON COPY TRICK

Copying everyone onto an email chain could be viewed as polite and courteous — or annoying, depending on whether the message topic is relevant to you. Sure, it’s a good idea to CC everyone in the office about an important policy that applies to all staff but maybe not about a meeting about Bring Your Child to Work Day if you don’t have kids.

In Outlook there’s a hack to filter out all those emails where you’re not the main recipient. Go to the Home tab, click “Rules”, and then “Create” a rule. Go to Advanced Options, and tick “where my name is in the cc box.” For the next step, you can tick the box to move it to a folder, or even permanently delete it if you’re feeling confident.

Gmail users can do something similar with the search function. Type cc: and your email address.

THE NUCLEAR OPTION

Perhaps you’ve tried out all these various hacks and whittled down your backlog but still have many more that you haven’t gone through. Then it could be time to consider the nuclear option: delete everything.

The benefit of this approach is that it really does provide you with a blank slate. You’ll have no more mental anxiety if you don’t have any more messages to worry about. The drawback, of course, is that you might lose any messages that might be important or precious.