LONDON — The new year is always a good time to make a fresh start — including with your email inbox. To kick off 2025 with a clean slate, why not clear out all those unnecessary and unwanted messages?
If you’re anything like me, you’ll have piles of messages that have been accumulating in your inbox: receipts, bank and credit card statements, mobile phone bills, plane tickets, restaurant bookings, reminders, security warnings, spam and more.
Mixed in with all that administrative detritus might be some personal missives from friends and family that are worth keeping.
There are several reasons to purge all that digital clutter. For one, it cuts the risk in case of a data breach. If hackers somehow gain access to your email, they won’t have any personal or financial info like credit card details to pilfer.
A decluttered inbox also helps boost productivity and focus because it’s easier to find important messages if you don’t have to sift through reams of irrelevant ones.
Some productivity proponents advocate inbox zero, a practice that requires dealing with each email that comes in so that by the end of the day your inbox is empty.
But who has the time and energy for that? If you’re busy, it’s easier to just deal with the messages that need immediate attention and ignore the rest. That is, until the backlog becomes too big.
Here are some tricks to tame your inbox by culling unwanted emails from important ones:
Email accounts used to have limited storage space, say a gigabyte or two at most, which meant that messages with big attachments took up lots of space. Nowadays, email comes with plenty of free storage but it’s still good practice to clear out oversized messages because they tend to build up over time. Do you really need to keep all those high-resolution photos of a forgotten friend’s grandchildren?
In Microsoft Outlook, click on the “Size” column or button to float the biggest messages to the top, where you can go through and delete them. Outlook also lets users sort by attachment so that messages with added files show at the top. If you want to save the message itself, right click on the attachment to remove it.
In Gmail, go to the search settings to filter out messages that are “greater than” a certain size. Start at, say, 20 megabytes, and then gradually reduce the number.
Emails from frequent automated senders, such as newsletters and mailing lists, can take up a lot of space in your inbox. Or perhaps you get a lot of security notifications from your bank that might be important in the moment but quickly become outdated.
It’s often too tedious to delete them individually so filter your inbox by sender to delete them as a group. In Outlook click the “From” column or button. In Gmail or Yahoo mail, use the search bar to look for the sender’s email address.
Combine this with another search trick that narrows down the date range to filter out all those old emails that you never got around to deleting. In Outlook or Gmail, you can set a date range to capture emails from, for example, 2010 to 2017, so that you can get rid of, say, all those utility bills you don’t need anymore.
Emails from mailing lists tend to include certain words or language that makes it a bit easier to filter them out. One such obvious term is “unsubscribe.” Searching for a word like that, which wouldn’t normally be used in emails written by humans, will identify all the newsletters for easy deletion.
Copying everyone onto an email chain could be viewed as polite and courteous — or annoying, depending on whether the message topic is relevant to you. Sure, it’s a good idea to CC everyone in the office about an important policy that applies to all staff but maybe not about a meeting about Bring Your Child to Work Day if you don’t have kids.
In Outlook there’s a hack to filter out all those emails where you’re not the main recipient. Go to the Home tab, click “Rules,” and then “Create” a rule. Go to Advanced Options, and tick “where my name is in the cc box.” For the next step, you can tick the box to move it to a folder, or even permanently delete it if you’re feeling confident.
Gmail users can do something similar with the search function. Type cc: and your email address.
Perhaps you’ve tried out all these various hacks and whittled down your backlog but still have many more that you haven’t gone through. Then it could be time to consider the nuclear option: delete everything.
The benefit of this approach is that it really does provide you with a blank slate. You’ll have no more mental anxiety if you don’t have any more messages to worry about. The drawback, of course, is that you might lose any messages that might be important or precious.
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