Why is it that I can’t keep my Inbox empty?
I know I’m weird this way, but I like organization. When a message comes into my email inbox, I read it. If it’s short and something I can answer right away, I write a reply.
When I’m done writing the reply, I either delete the message or I save it in an email folder. For example, email I get from a publisher, I save in my Work folder. Email I get from family members goes into the Family or Personal folder.
My goal is to keep the inbox relatively empty; only those messages awaiting answers or reminding me to do something are kept in the inbox.
Well, actually, my goal is to have an empty inbox, but I can’t quite seem to achieve that.
No matter how hard I press myself, I let a few messages linger. Like, for example, right now there are eight messages in my inbox; several that need replies, one to remind me to do something (a follow-up) and three I could delete if I wanted to.
My observation is that not everyone strives to keep an empty email inbox. In fact, most people I’ve seen keep all their email messages in the inbox. Thousands. They seem to never delete anything.
How those people keep track of which messages still need replies is beyond me. Or maybe it’s that sloppy approach that explains why some people never reply to email. Perhaps they just can’t find the message because the inbox is overwhelmed with hundreds, if not thousands, of email messages.
Without any reason to clean out your email inbox, such as a warning or growing sluggishness from the program, there really isn’t any reason to organize your email. So I’m left with believing that my efforts toward emptying an inbox are my own admitted defect. Yet I’m still puzzled how some people can keep a gazillion messages in their inbox and not have that be a bother.
I’ve got hundreds of emails in my Yahoo account, I think about deleting them, but occasionally I have to look for one sent a while ago, for a link or attachment so I use the search tool on the mail account. The one I use at work I tend to delete stuff after a month or so, because the I.T. guys start getting annoyed about the size of peoples inbox. Outlook does seem to suffer from bloat problems once you have over a certain number. Windows Live mail seems to be OK though, Although I had better clean some of that up to! There are quite a few email programs out there to help people manage their inbox, but I’m not so sure about those because they just put you messages in different orders and folders as well as prioritising what you should reply to first.
Comment by chiefnoobie — November 13, 2010 @ 4:33 am
Currently I have 28,411 emails in my Gmail inbox. The reason I keep all emails is because I have no reason to delete them. This has actually helped me a lot. I can search for anything from six years ago and Gmail finds it instantly. I even send myself emails with text like “Important information of this and this and that,” and with all sorts of links, so that I can search for it at a later date. I use labels for filtering very important emails. My Hotmail inbox is the opposite, I forward important emails to my Gmail inbox and keep my inbox empty.
But still… I think I could archive all my email messages to tidy up my Gmail inbox. Maybe I will do that some day.
Comment by samus250 — November 13, 2010 @ 5:01 am
I’ve found emails from years ago that I’d forgotten about, it’s sometimes a bit like re reading a diary. It tells yo what you were doing at a certain time and date.
Comment by chiefnoobie — November 13, 2010 @ 5:59 am
I just got a program called MailSteward. It’s an email archiving program that runs twice a week. As long as I don’t delete anything from the Inbox, MailSteward archives the message in a database. Then I can delete the messages about once a week (if I get around to it). Beyond that, the Deleted Items folder isn’t programmed to delete any messages until they’re a month old.
Still, I wish I kept my Gmail inbox. (I’m jealous of samus250’s 28,411 messages!) There were some messages in there that I deleted that I wish I had back. MailSteward does archive Gmail, because I pick up my Gmail in my regular inbox, but I can’t recover messages I deleted before I started using MailSteward.
BTW, MailSteward is a Mac program. Don’t know if they have a PC version.
Comment by admin — November 13, 2010 @ 8:34 am
In my OUtlook inbox at the moment, I have 4892 unread emails our of a total of 17701. Most of them are notifications from Facebook and the like that I’ve ignored.
When I get an email from a real person, it usually gets read and followed up instantly, whether it be in the form of a reply or being marked with an appropriate category (the most common one being “Orangeness of Importance” which is coincidentally orange)
For me, I just don’t delete them. I’m too lazy and I see no reason to not keep the emails around. If I need something, I just punch a few keywords into the search bar and Outlook finds it pretty quickly.
I do have Outlook set up to AutoArchive after a certain period of time but I don’t think it is doing that for some reason.
My Gmail inbox has 26511 emails, all of which have been kept since it’s inception, and are also spread over about three different Outlook PSTs on two computers.
Comment by Douglas — November 14, 2010 @ 3:03 am
Douglas — You Win!
Comment by admin — November 14, 2010 @ 9:09 am