Recently, I came across an amazing system for organizing your email inbox.  It’s called Revive Your Inbox, and it consists of 21 steps to “restore your email sanity.”  If you’re interested in the full “program”, click here to access it.  In the meantime, here are 5 main points that will help you get on your way to a more sane inbox.

1. Unsubscribe From Junk Mail

This is not new information.  I’ve talked about this a lot in other blogs, tips and presentations.  The article, however, details specifically how to handle junk mail.  Examples are:

• Check the email for an “unsubscribe” link, click it, and follow the steps to unsubscribe.  If there’s no “unsubscribe” link, or you are suspicious about the source, mark the message as spam.
• Edit notification preferences in your social networks.
• Search on these terms in your inbox to find subscriptions you might have missed: unsubscribe, update preferences, manage notifications, remove me, remove yourself, mailing list, email list and click here.

2. Learn How to Search For Email

• Click here for access to printable cheat sheets for Outlook and Gmail.
• Filter or narrow your results by: from, has:attachment, label, before and filename.  (Terms vary with different email systems).
• Check spam and trash if you still can’t find an email.

3.  Cleaning Up A Messy Inbox

Archiving is one of the safest and easiest ways to organize your email.

• Create a folder to archive old emails, that you may still need.   Call it “Old Mail”.  Move anything over 30 days old that is not trash to this folder.
• If you have done NOTHING with an email in over 30 days, you probably never will.  Delete it!
• For more information on archiving, the article contains specific how-to information for Gmail, Outlook and other email systems.

4.  Delete It 

• Save space by deleting emails that contain one or more large attachments.
• Delete anything that contains information you will never need such as expired coupons and password reset forms.
• Deleting email makes searching faster and keeps you under your mailbox size quota.

5.  Mute an Email Thread

• Most email systems provide the ability to mute a conversation.  The numerous replies won’t flood your inbox. They can be sent right to an archive folder.
• Familiarize yourself with how to set this up for your particular system.
• Large mailing lists can generate over 50 message threads.  Mute them, if they are not relevant to you.

There are several more steps to organizing your inbox outlined in the Revive Your Inbox article. These are just a few of my favorites.  They are quick, and you can start them now.  Thanks to the Baydin Team for publishing this valuable information!

If you’re still not sure where to start, contact us, and we’d be happy to point you in the right direction!