‘Still 21,987 unread emails’. Pfff... It seems like mopping with the tap open: keeping and clearing your mailbox! In this fast-paced digital age, your mailbox quickly becomes overflowing with newsletters, delivery service updates, promotions, spam and other unread e-mails. You would almost get despondent. And yet, there is hope! In this article, we share quick tips to get your mailbox in order within half an hour. And no, you really don't have to tick and delete everything page by page. We have smart tips for bulk actions!
The environmental impact of your mailbox
When you think of tidying up, the first thing that comes to mind is all the physical stuff in your house, but digitally you also make a lot of clutter. Take that mailbox. All those e-mails - especially e-mails with large attachments - take up space. And for that space in the cloud, data centres have to work very hard. And those data centres, in turn, use a lot of energy and water. And so, with all your digital possessions, you also contribute to global warming.
The fact that our digital possessions are no cat's pee is also evident from several studies. For instance, research by Lancaster University found that all gadgets, internet use and data traffic together are responsible for 3.7% of global CO2 emissions. And telecom company XS4ALL calculated for Wed out that we send some 250 trillion (FYI: 1 trillion = 12 zeros) emails per day worldwide, equivalent to the CO2 emissions of Japan. In short, not only is a tidy mailbox nice for your own peace of mind, the planet benefits too. So get to work cleaning up your mailbox.
Getting started: cleaning up your mailbox in 30 minutes
- Search your inbox for ‘unsubscribe’ and ‘unsubscribe’. Start by searching for emails with the terms ‘unsubscribe’ and ‘unsubscribe’. This will show all newsletters and marketing emails. Select these emails and delete them in bulk. That shoots up nicely!
- Do the same for other keywords such as ‘customer service’, ‘appointment confirmation’, ‘reminder’, ‘PostNL’, ‘DHL’, ‘Vinted’, and you may have more ideas for keywords that produce useful hits.
- You do the next big bulk action by searching on ‘unread’ and ‘unread emails’. These emails were apparently not important enough to open, so delete them now. Optionally, you can scan the unread emails from the past three months to make sure you haven't overlooked anything important.
- Then delete emails in the ‘Promotions’ and ‘Spam’ folder.
- Look for emails with large, heavy attachments that take up a lot of space. Save only the attachments that are important and delete the rest as well. You can also filter emails with (heavy) attachments.
- Don't forget to empty the bin to really free up the space!
- Bonus tip: every time you receive a newsletter that you do not find interesting or that you did not ask for, delete it immediately, double check if you have already deleted all newsletters from this sender - if not, delete the whole buts by searching on the sender - and unsubscribe from future newsletters. This will prevent your inbox from filling up with unnecessary emails again!
Some people swear by putting important mails in detailed folders. Making folders can certainly be useful, but don't make it a time-consuming study of making numerous folders. In the end, the search function of your mailbox is so good that you will find important mails easily anyway, as long as you don't delete them!
Note: for your work, you need to save some emails!
Don't just throw away all mails from your business inbox! For companies and the self-employed, there is a legal retention obligation of seven years, including for e-mails! For your work as a self-employed person or entrepreneur, you receive dozens of e-mails every day. Which ones should you keep? Bookkeeper Marcel Huting: ‘E-mails (both internal and external) that relate to your business operations belong to your administration just as much as your receipts and invoices. Think, for example, of e-mails about business appointments, e-mails containing an invoice or other important notes. The retention obligation therefore applies here. Always keep invoices in the form in which you received them. So you have to save an electronic invoice as a file. Of course, you can print such an invoice for your own purposes, but the original file and email must remain.’ You can find more accounting tips from Marcel in this article!
Cleaning up your mailbox in 30 minutes!
A tidy mailbox is within reach with these simple steps. Put on some nice music or your favourite podcast and get started with this big clean-up. Ready? Make a weekly diary entry of cleaning up your mailbox, that way it's five minutes' work at most every week and you'll keep your head and the planet a lot cleaner!
Earlier, we also wrote an article with tips for getting your photo and video cloud in order. If you have not yet done so, the tip is to start doing so. Very likely, this cloud storage is even much bigger than your mailbox. Good luck with that. Or should we say strength?
More tips from thegreenlist.nl
- Read also: five tips for more sustainable internet use.
- Read also: This is how you reduce the footprint of your smartphone.
- Read also: Clearing WhatsApp: here's how to free up space!
Sources: BBC, Wed. Photo credits: main image: Daniel Snipes (Pexels).
