Can someone help me organise my emails?? I have 5,000 emails in my inbox and 5 email addresses!

[Worriedaboutleaving]

I’ve got myself in a mess and need some help with the best way to delete emails while keeping important ones!

I have work (self-employed) and personal email addresses.

I’ve set up smart mailboxes where emails automatically go in to them, but then I have around 3 million spam emails.

What’s the best way to do a mass delete without missing anything crucial? Often I don’t delete emails as I go in case I need them later. Or they’re customer emails and so I keep those ‘just in case too’.

Argh.

I have to force myself to delete emails once I have read them. Obviously some you have to keep. I am always getting messages saying my mail box full. I don’t know what answer as everyone an his dog seem to want my email these days. Drives me nuts.

And does anyone ever delete emails you’ve sent??

I’d start by using the search function and searching for “unsubscribe.” This will bring up any marketing emails and none of your customers’ emails will include that word. Then you can select a load at once and delete them, which will help whittle them down quite quickly!

I’m also in the same boat of multiple email accounts, I never delete (apart from obvious junk/newsletters), I just use search function to find anything I need or star really important stuff

What programme are you using? I find outlook is substantially better than gmail for organising and filing emails. PP suggestion of searching for unsubscribe for weeding out spam/promotional messages is good - those you definitely CAN delete.

Do you have a spreadsheet with your customers' email addresses? If so, you could create a rule so that emails to/from them go into a particular folder/tag, and then you can set about mass deleting the rest.

This is deeply unhelpful but I read somewhere that you have to be careful with ‘unsubscribe’ but for the life of me can’t remember why!

If you reply to 'unsubscribe' then they know it is still a live email address.

I once left an organisation and went back 10 years later and I was still on a mailing list for an organisation that I'd hired during that first stint.

OP if you have important people, just search for them and move them to a 'to do' type in box. And then mass delete all the rest. Then move the important people back.

When I worked I used to have a clear in box on a friday rule. It really helped to clear the decks for the weekend and not worry about stuff.