A mini break through with email

[Dave2002]

I discovered what is, for me, a useful way of managing large volumes of email in Gmail under MacOS.

In Mac mail I set up a number of smart mailboxes - called "Begins with A", "Begins with B" etc. right through to "Begins with Z"

If one of these is accessed and then the mailbox is ordered by From, it is quite likely that many emails will be found adjacent in the listing coming from single sources, such as an online shopping site, or a news site etc . These can then be rapidly scanned and selected - in case there are any that might be worth keeping - and then all the selected ones tossed into the Trash/Bin. Then the Trash/Bin has to be accessed - again select all of the newly moved items (since they've probably not been really deleted yet ...) and delete them again.

This process appears to work, as after a few days my Gmail account has reduced by over a Gigabyte.

Others have said - "Why not just list alphabetically, and delete from there?"

Reason - chances are that by that approach the only emails which will be deleted will be the ones beginning with "A". Few people are going to have the patience to work through an inbox sorted alphabetically and work through from A to Z.

The way to use the system here is to choose choose a letter at random on any one day, and look at that email only. That should be manageable, and it's typically possible to delete several hundred emails in a very short while by this method. The largest number I've done in one swoop was a few days ago - over 1400. Sometimes these individual emails are themseslves quite small, but taken altogether they may use up a lot of storage. The feeling of satisfaction at discovering whole chunks of email one may not even have known about and removing them may also spur one on to do more than one letter mailbox in a session. Sometimes also one does discover other email which should be kept, but mostly this method enables quick and fairly safe removal of very large amounds of email which is really not needed - probably never was either - such as news bulletins.

This is more likely for subscribers to online newspapers, which one may be happy to have, but as with physical newspapers, the online sites often send out supplements, other sections etc. and any one individual is unlikely to want all of them. For example, I now subscribe to the NY Times and the Washington Post, and there are many articles I want to read, but also many that I don't, or don't have time to read. In any case, as a subscriber, if I delete one from my email and I really need/want it, I should be able to get it back from the origin site by logging in. I can work on the assumption that anything that's more than (say) a month old and not around a significant event can be deleted.

Most of the commercial/advertising material (yes - you did buy a pair of shoes from a site 5 years ago ...and now you discover you have more than 200 copies of emails with pictures of shoes in .... !!) can be deleted and never accessed again - and not even opened.

[Beresford]

Very neat, and I guess you could group the incoming ones as A to D etc.
I wonder if it is the attachments that take up most of the Gigabyte? But sorting attachments is probably harder than sorting emails.

About once per year I sort all the Inbox in alphabetical order, and as you say that makes it much easier to delete loads. But I have not yet found an easy way of separating the ones I decided to keep last year from this year's mix.
There is something satisfying about deleting a gigabyte of unwanted stuff all in one go. But there are much more satisfying things - like music.

[Anastasius]

.....
There is something satisfying about deleting a gigabyte of unwanted stuff all in one go. But there are much more satisfying things - like music.

I deleted 200GB some while back. It was all sat on an external drive and the data was on there only because it had overflowed my internal drive. I realised that in the last year I'd not accessed all this data once. In fact some hadn't been accessed for three years. I reformatted the drive. What was the data ? Mainly Afternoon on Three and the odd Saturday opera. Nearly all unindexed and hence irretrievable with difficulty. Never regretted it.

I'm thinking about giving my CD collection away to the charity shop. I worked out that I'll be dead before I finish listening to all of them again just the once. Qobuz and streaming works perfectly for me these days.

[Dave2002]

Very neat, and I guess you could group the incoming ones as A to D etc.
I wonder if it is the attachments that take up most of the Gigabyte? But sorting attachments is probably harder than sorting emails.

About once per year I sort all the Inbox in alphabetical order, and as you say that makes it much easier to delete loads. But I have not yet found an easy way of separating the ones I decided to keep last year from this year's mix.
There is something satisfying about deleting a gigabyte of unwanted stuff all in one go. But there are much more satisfying things - like music.

I'm afraid I've not yet adopted Anastasius' sane approach of not buying CDs, and dumping everything - I shall put that off for another year or two

Re sorting emails - msg 2 - using MacOS and smart mailboxes I think it should be possible to have extra categories. If we think of the contents of the smart mailboxes as bins (in the sense sometimes used in computer science) then splitting them into Current year and Other years wouldn't be difficult, or maybe Current year, Previous year, and other years.
Then make the assumption that most of the contents of the other years have already been at least partly selected as worth keeping, while anything in the Previous year bin would be a candidate for deletion.

The process could be refined further by having some mailboxes (smart or otherwise - though smart would do) which are specifically to catch known types of email.

I don't know whether Windows email has a similar feature to the Mac Mail smart mailboxes - though I suspect it may have.

Indeed - although I grouped the incoming items by just one letter A, B,C etc. it would be possible to just use a range A-D, E-H and so on if that worked for you. The thing is a balance between having too many separate lists, and having very large lists in each grouping. For me single letter classification so far works fine.

I have to admit my motivation for doing it was at least twofold - firstly to reduce the pressure on my mail system so the the mail provider doesn't block incoming mail, and secondly to reduce the storage requirements on my own equipment - particularly the laptop. I wasn't sure that this would work, but so far it seems OK and manageable.

The culling process does also make one very aware of some incoming material that really wasn't wanted at all - and presents an opportunity to make a rule to filter that - or at least make a decision on whether to do that.

However, there is now such a lot of incoming email that sometimes things which are really useful or "important" get swamped by the rest, so although having a cull of the extra email is a good idea, this needs to be done in such a way that there is little chance actually deleting something which really ought to be kept. I will address that by having some extra rules - for example for email with details of Zoom meetings - which sometimes take a lot of finding amongst all the others.

[Dave2002]

Slightly surprised over the last few days to notice that items such as "Apple" and "Boston Globe" were turning up in my smart email box for the letter 'N'. On further examination, it looks as though many organisations send out email apparently from "newseletter.***" or "notifications.***" etc. Ah well - still winning on dumping email - nearly 2 Gbytes gone now fairly painlessly, so maybe in a year's time I'll have hardly any left. You wish!