Getting Too Many Emails? Here’s How to Get Your Inbox in Order

Unsubscribe and delete

Go to your inbox and find an email from a sender that you never open. Go to the search bar and type that name – which will bring up all the emails from that person or company. Open up the email and simply unsubscribe. You will stop getting emails from them anymore. If it’s not that important, select all of them and delete in bulk. Do this when you’re not busy and set yourself 10 minutes for this task. You might be tempted to use free services like unroll.me but they don’t totally unsubscribe since after you stop using them, they dump all the emails back to your inbox. Also, they’re not safe as they go through your emails, crawling for data to sell to other tech corporations.

Get organized and start using filters, folders or labels

Organize your emails with folders or labels such as school, personal, work or finance. You can go ahead and arrange them in terms of priority like time-sensitive labels such as today, this week or this month.

Get a habit

For those of us who open up our emails in the morning, mark anything urgent so it becomes the first thing to deal with when you get on your computer and schedule it or use the 2-minute rule. Basically, the two-minute rule is where if you can deal with the email in 2 minutes, do it, if not schedule it for when you have adequate time to work on it. This clears a lot of the low priority emails.

Get a throwaway email or a dummy email

We’ve all been there – while you’re browsing you get to find a really good free or promotional service but to enjoy it, you have to create an account with your email. Here’s how to create a disposable one so that the free services you signed up for don’t fill your email with spam:

Gmail has one, and yes it surprised us too.

Basically, when you’re asked for your email, type it as normal but end it with a specific tag, something like “unwantedemail” so that your email goes from xxx@gmail dot com to xxx+unwantedemail@gmail dot com. This new email will still get shown in your inbox as regular emails but they’re easy to delete and you can keep using them whenever needed.

Here’s how to delete them – you set up a filter to this address and make it so that it gets autodeleted every time you get emails from the services you signed up from. Type your particular “+” tag in the search box at the top of your inbox and click the arrow on the right-hand side. Then put that tag into the “From” portion of the filter form and click “Create filter with this search.”

Tick the “Delete it” box and click “Create Filter.” And now you won’t see emails coming through your throwaway email account.

Onetime use disposable email

For those that really want an email to use each time you need one, services like Maildrop allow you to create a true disposable email.

Choose a memorable and unique one and type it at the box labelled “view-this-mailbox”, click GO button that will take you to your inbox.
If you used a very common one, you’ll get emails already sent so choose one specific address to you. So now you won’t have to give your real email address.
Other services you can try include 10minutemail.com, mailnator.com or fake mail generator