It’s astonishing how one’s inbox can quickly become a repository of countless messages that slowly turn from a seemingly minor nuisance to one of the biggest email chores to handle. Some messages even enter inboxes that have an intent to ‘phishingly’ harm. I’m not even talking about spam here because what’s more subtle is the growing number of bacn. These are the likes of but not limited to email subscriptions, sign-ups, newsletters, social network notifications, and mailing lists.
I personally know of some users who have thousands to tens of thousands of messages all situated in their inbox. The problem with this is that there’s a tendency you’ll miss out on an important email due to the barrage of messages that has went in with it.
Do you consciously aim for inbox-zero or have been wanting to do so since thousands of messages ago? Have you experienced emailing someone to their “primary” address, but their reply comes in a few weeks after ? (or worse, after over a month - the horror!!)
If your email provider has a filtering feature, that would be the first tool I would use & highly recommend. This feature is not new with many email providers, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t even bother using it. With Gmail it’s relatively easy to setup, below are the basic steps.
1. Open a message you’d like to filter (let’s take for example, a notification from twitter)
2. Select the drop-down action item “Filter messages like this”
3. Replace the email address username & ampersand seen in the From field with an asterisk
4. After clicking “Next”, click on “Skip the Inbox” & “Apply the label” (e.g. Twitter), also click “Also apply filter to N conversations below” if applicable.
5. Click “Create Filter”, and you’re done!
On step #3 - The asterisk symbol helps create a catch-all for emails coming from that particular domain which is especially helpful & time-saving especially for bacn messages. See illustration below:
From the whole address:
To the wildcard statement:
Have you ever tried setting up filters for your email account? It has so far worked for me, that’s why I thought sharing this article might help you approach inbox-zero minus the hassle.
