A few days ago, I decided I had enough with my email.  With over 12,000 unread messages, it was way too overwhelming to handle.  What really tipped it over was the excessive spam messages that had started to make their way into my inbox.  Perhaps my account started to get corrupted after all these years – I’ve had this same address for at least ten years now.  Whatever the reason, with problems running rampant in the legacy account, I decided it was time for a change.

I got a brand new inbox and set my primary email to direct to it (the spam was going to my old Yahoo email, so I figured a new one would help eliminate the issue).  I have an email associated with this domain that I use for just about everything now and that one hasn’t had spam problems.  I then went through some of the newsletters and notification emails I get that I don’t usually have time for.  Some I unsubscribed from and others I directed to the original Yahoo account to help cut down on clutter in the new inbox.

I was pretty happy with this fresh start, but then I noticed something in my email account that I had never looked at before: Organizer.  It’s an app that works with my Yahoo account, helping me sort my emails by sender as they come in.  There are folders for categories like Finance, Shopping, and Social Media.  They basically set up a bunch of filters by default, to ensure that my main inbox stays clean.  I can check the other folders at my leisure and move messages around to fit my needs.  Each day, they send a summary email detailing what they filed away, highlighting things like offers and shipping info (if I had any tracking info sent to me).  I don’t really read that and just go through the folders myself, but I can see how it would be handy.

Now I have a refreshingly empty inbox and my daily intake of messages is something I can easily handle.  No more overwhelming feeling, no more dread at picking through the unimportant mail to find what I might actually still want to read.  Granted, I still have that 12k of unread messages waiting for me in the other account, but at least I can tackle that with more confidence when I have some time (and patience).  I put Organizer to work on that one too, so about half the messages got filed away into categories I can look into one at a time.  I’m so happy to be able to breathe a sigh of relief at this organizational nightmare!  We’ll see how many more years it takes before things pile up too much again…