Using E-Mail the Right Way

Clutter is the bane of my existence. I can’t fathom how some people have hundreds (thousands?) of unread e-mails, all in just 1 or 2 folders. How would one even begin to process that? I feel compelled to make this post, in which I will show how I organize e-mails. It’s really easy to do it right, yet not many people do. Step one is Inbox zero.

Inbox zero is a technique to avoid clutter in one’s Inbox. It essentially consists of delegating every e-mail that arrives in your Inbox as soon as it arrives. Delegate here means either read it, reply and archive/delete it or just move to a different folder, maintaining, or not, its unread status. You shouldn’t be moving e-mails to a different folder manually though. There are e-mail rules for that. Pretty much every e-mail provider should support them. Here’s how I do it.

I have my own domain - several in fact - and I employ e-mail aliases for different services. For example, for shopping related things, I either use a general alias such as “[email protected]” or a specific one, e.g. “[email protected]”. I then set up rules in my e-mail provider to move every incoming e-mail that is sent to “shopping” or “amazon” to a folder called “Shopping”. I do this for Shopping, Banking, Personal, Health, Newsletters, etc etc. Every single e-mail should have its own category.

I sometimes also use a service such as AnonAddy or SimpleLogin. Both of these are Open-Source and have free tiers, though they are worth their weight in gold and you should definitely go for the premium versions. These services substitute, or complement, having your own domain alias for every service, the difference being that instead of having “[email protected]” you have “[email protected]”. For those that don’t have their own domain, this is almost mandatory.

An interesting benefit to this method is that you will easily notice which services are selling your info to third parties. If you receive non-amazon related content on your amazon address, then amazon most likely sold your address. If this happens and you start receiving spam on a given address, you can just block it without having to change hundreds of accounts.

Now, one may be asking “How is this helpful, all you do is move emails to different folders”. My answer to that would be that the difference between using my method (or a similar one) and not using it is the same as the difference between having your kitchen-ware and clothes and everything you own in its proper place or opening the door to your apartment and first thing you see is everything, from clothes to kitchen-ware to technology peripherals, in the floor. With no structure. Everything thrown in the floor. In this analogy, anytime you would need a spoon to eat your soup you would have to go the floor and find it among the hundreds of items spread there.

When I open my e-mail, I do see several unread e-mails, but they are organized, in their proper place. I know that in the “Shopping” folder I will find the invoice for the item I just bought. I know that in the “Banking” folder I will have e-mails pertaining to my banking movements. In some cases, it may even make sense to automatically change their status from “unread” to “read” when moving them. If I notice that I am receiving spam in one address, I immediately block it and contact the company that sold it. Perhaps they did not sell it and have actually a breach in their security, i.e., were hacked? Who knows, but it won’t take much of your time.

I think Marie Kondo would aprove of how organized my e-mail is.