Inbox zero

How I went from 22,508 new messages to inbox zero in 36 hours without losing anything important.

My email inbox was an embarrassing mess. This is the story of how I cleaned it all up--quickly, efficiently, for free, and without losing anything important.

Maybe one of my readers is in the same situation and will find it helpful.

To set the stage: There were 22,508 unread messages in my Gmail account, plus thousands more that I must have clicked on, but that I hadn't deleted.

After procrastinating for a very long time, I finally decided to do something about it. I started on a Tuesday evening, and I had Inbox Zero by Thursday morning.

I'll explain the steps below. But quickly, let me just share three initial points:

1. First, there was no big, secret trick. Once I figured out how to untangle my email, doing it took dedicated effort, but it was mostly the kind of thing I could do while sitting on the couch and watching soccer on TV.

2. Second, I was adamant that I would do this by myself: no browser extensions, no giving my password to an assistant. Mainly, I wanted to ensure that I knew exactly what had been done.

3. Third, my system worked, but I'm not going to tell you it's the most efficient method. Others who are smarter might find better ideas!

I'm glad that I took the time to do this. I'm surprised at the literal, physical feeling of reduced stress that I've felt by getting this account under control. Also, I found three pure diamonds in terms of emails that I would have otherwise missed. (I'll talk about those at the end.)

First, let me guide you through what I learned.

1. It's mostly about sender management.

Of my 22,508 unread messages, perhaps 1,000 were things that I actually wanted to read or save. Also, I realized that about 90 percent of these valuable messages were sent by roughly 100 different senders.

However, these messages were drowning in a never-ending barrage of more stuff.

The key was to reorganize everything by sender, instead of by date, at least for cleaning purposes. However, if you're using Gmail, as I was, this can be difficult. So, I had to come up with my own techniques.

2. Choose your email program.

The easiest way I found to sort by sender was to use a separate email program. Reading my Gmail via the Mail program that came on my MacBook Air worked, since you can sort by date, by size, by subject, and by sender. (You can’t do this on the Gmail web interface.)

I started by culling the herd, by searching for words like "special offer" or "unsubscribe" or "time is running out," or even copyright notices; things that you would only expect to find in commercial messages, and archiving them.

Archiving so many of these at once pained me because ... well, obviously I write a newsletter (actually, 2 newsletters!). I hated to imagine anyone doing this to my work! But, it was necessary.

3. Spreadsheets are your friend.

For reasons I'll explain shortly, I also wanted a single list of every address that had ever sent me an email.

I am no programmer, but I was able to connect my Gmail to a Google Sheet, and then copy a script that I found on Stack Overflow to extract all the senders’ email addresses.

I'm not going to link to the specific one I used here, because it's a bit risky just using someone else's (freely shared) work like this. But, you should be able to find something similar if this interests you.

Doing this meant I could create filters in Gmail to archive messages from each sender, starting with the most-common sender. I also created rules so that any new incoming emails from those senders would skip the Inbox.

4. Separate the domains from the addresses.

This was something I hadn't thought of. Once I gave permission to a marketer to send me messages, they often wound up sending emails from multiple addresses on the same domain, for example:

• "noreply@bigsavingstoday.com," and

• "marketing@bigsavingstoday.com," and

• "offers@bigsavingstoday.com."

Getting rid of many of these quickly was a lot easier after I extracted the domains from the email addresses. I did this within Google sheets simply by using the SPLIT function.

For example, if an email address was in cell A1, you'd enter the following formula in cell B1: "SPLIT(A1,"@")." (Don't include the opening and closing quotes or the period.)

This puts everything to the left of the "@" sign in one cell, and everything after it -- which in most cases was the domain itself -- in the next cell.

Using these lists of domains, I was able to create filters in Gmail that would wipe out entire swaths of emails that I would never in a million years have time to read. It was significantly faster than just using the Mail program.

5. Filters rule.

This is going to be Gmail-specific, but I've alluded to filters a few times, and I should expound a bit more.

A reasonable person might ask, Why not just unsubscribe from all the random non-personal emails?

The reason is that unsubscribing takes several steps: (a) open the email, (b) scroll down, (c) find the unsubscribe link, (d) click it, (e) wait for a new page to load, and either (f) verify that you've automatically been unsubscribed, or else (g) figure out how to do it from that page.

We're only talking about seconds, but they're my seconds.

So, by searching in Gmail for senders with specific domains, and clicking the little "create filter" link at the bottom of that search page, I was able to archive hundreds of messages at once, apply labels to them, and ensure that incoming emails from those domains would skip the inbox.

6. Who's sending this stuff?

I want to point out that almost none of the email that was clogging my inbox was spam. But, I'd signed up for a lot of things that seemed like they'd been interesting at the time, but that I never had time to read -- along with things that came from approved senders but that I didn't really need.

Think: UPS.com notifications, real estate alerts, or a notification every single time someone signed up for my newsletter.

I also hate to admit it, but one of the most massive space-takers in my inbox was the thousands upon thousands of press releases that people send me.

I understand and respect that it's people's job to do this, but the vast majority wind up in my filters now, unread. Not for the first time, I thought: There has to be a better way.

The diamonds in the rough

In the end, I also came across quite a few emails that I had missed or did not know I had, but that I really wanted to read and save. There were dozens of these, but three in particular stood out:

• A notification that somebody wanted to offer me a few thousand dollars for a domain name I’d bought long ago and held onto without really thinking about it.

• An email from a friend who has since passed away. I'd read this one back in the day but I was very glad to find it again.

• Another email from a friend I hadn't heard from in more than a decade. I completely missed this one at the time, and I’m pretty sure he’s forgiven me for taking more than 2 years to reply!

Overall, this was a learning experience, and nowhere near as difficult as I feared it might be.

But, even if finding these three messages had been the only benefit, the whole thing would have been worth it.

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7 other things …

• A Reuters/Ipsos 2-day poll that closed on Tuesday (conducted after the attempt on Trump’s life) found that 80% of voters - including similar shares of Democrats and Republicans - said they agreed with a statement that "the country is spiraling out of control."(The Hill)

• The president of Florida’s only public historically Black university is resigning amid backlash over the school’s apparent failure to properly vet a multi-million dollar donation from a dubious donor. Larry Robinson submitted his resignation last week. During a graduation ceremony in May, Robinson stood on stage in his academic regalia holding a jumbo check for $237 million, a gift that would have been the single largest private donation to a historically Black college or university – if it ever materialized. (AP)

• Over the past two decades, tattoos of the Olympic rings have become almost ubiquitous at the Summer Olympics − visible on the arms, necks, torsos, ankles and feet of athletes competing across disciplines and in almost every sport. Some go big, with sprawling, colorful and at times ornate versions of the rings that are impossible to miss on TV. Others opt for something smaller, or more subtle. But for most, the mark's meaning is the same. It's an ever-present reminder of the hard work they've put into their craft, and the success they've achieved. (USA Today)

• Rare images of the Mashco Piro, an uncontacted Indigenous tribe in the remote Peruvian Amazon, were published on Tuesday by Survival International, showing dozens of the people on the banks of a river close to where logging companies have concessions. The reclusive tribe has been sighted coming out of the rainforest more frequently in recent weeks in search of food, apparently moving away from the growing presence of loggers. (Reuters)

• Ozy Media and its founder Carlos Watson were convicted of fraud by a Brooklyn federal jury on Tuesday. Founded in 2013, Ozy imploded in 2021 after news reports questioned its audience numbers and revealed that a top executive had impersonated a YouTube executive during a call with Goldman Sachs bankers in which he claimed the streaming site agreed to pay for exclusive rights to an Ozy show. (CNBC)

• A small new study shows reactions in the brains of people who were given psilocybin in a controlled setting. The brain scans, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, offer a rare glimpse into the wild neural storm associated with mind-altering drugs. (NY Times)

• The most-stressed cities in America? Cleveland, Detroit, and Baltimore. Least stressed? Fremont, California, Burlington, Vermont, and Fargo, North Dakota. (WalletHub)

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Thanks for reading. Photo derived from an AI engine, which is the first time I’ve done something like this. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.