Buried In Emails? Shrink Your Massive Inbox To Zero With Mailstrom
I’m not kidding about inbox issues. My Yahoo email account has over 13,000 emails. Gmail has over 10,000. As part of this article, my goal was to see if I could start chopping a few thousand emails off of that 10,000 Gmail account. If effective, I would probably sign up for a full account with Mailstrom.
Upon first signing up for a free account with Mailstrom, I discovered the limit trial was just under 1500 email deletions for free. After others at MUO tested the software, we determined that the trial deletions are dependent upon how many total messages you have in your inbox. As you test the service, there will be an option to continue extending the free deletions up to over just over a third of your inbox, after which you’ll need to sign up for a paid plan to clean up the rest. This test period was plenty to test how effective the Mailstrom system is at cleaning up a massively cluttered inbox.
We’ve offered a number of solutions through the years to manage your Gmail account and to clean up a cluttered inbox, using different solutions like MailMate or Gmail’s own unsubscribe button. All of these solutions are fantastic, but nothing is more convenient than a central online solution like Mailstrom.
Cleaning Up Your Inbox
For many people, the reason for not tidying up the inbox is lack of time. Mailstrom’s slogan is simply, “Clean Up Your Inbox Now”. They literally mean now.
Before you can get started right now, you have to sign up for an account. Mailstrom is especially effective with Gmail accounts and Windows Live accounts, but didn’t work when I tried it with Yahoo. The system said that Yahoo was only temporarily not available. Testing with Gmail worked immediately, and the system instantly started sifting through the account.
Time is the key behind making inbox organization. Scrolling down through 10,000 individual emails to find the ones that you can delete will just never do when things have gotten that far out of hand. Instead, Mailstrom identifies and sorts your email into various categories like Sending, Subject, whether you can Unsubscribe, whether it’s from a shopping merchant or anyone else.
The point of this is to give you very big blocks of emails that you can manage all at once, rather than one at a time. The Sender category instantly revealed one of my biggest culprits — daily subscriptions to Google Alerts which weren’t being properly filtered to another folder that could be cleaned up at regular intervals. Instead they were all cluttering the inbox.
You’ll discover all kinds of opportunities like this using Mailstrom. It’ll let you identify and wipe out or better organize hundreds to thousands of emails in seconds.
Deciding What to Do With Your Email
When you click on an individual email, Mailstrom provides you with several options, including moving them to a more descriptive folder (and out of your inbox), deleting, archiving, moving to the Spam folder, or “Chill”.
Chill is a cool feature where you can force the email to be re-delivered at a later time when you know you’ll be better prepared to deal with it.
If you’re having space issues with your email account, you can go right to the “Size” category and instantly find the biggest culprits – those emails in the “Extra Large” and “Jumbo” categories.
Don’t worry about losing important emails — instead of losing those critical ones that you come across with Mailstrom, just click on the “Move” button and organize them into an “Important” folder that you can deal with later, instead of letting those emails get buried underneath a cluttered inbox.
Using Mailstrom Categories
The reason Mailstrom is effective at helping you clean up huge collections of email is because it helps you group up those cluttered emails into blocks that you can organize or delete all at once. Some collections are more useful than others depending how you use your email most of the time.
For example, if you’re a shopaholic and you’ve signed up for all kinds of shopping deal newsletters or alerts through the years, the odds are pretty good that the “Shopping” category will help you out a lot.
If you’re a social media addict and you’ve enabled email alerts in all of your social accounts, then you can just imagine how much the “Social” category will help you clean things up.
If you are at your wits end, and you just want to wipe out everything that’s older than a certain date, then the “time” category is where you’ll want to get started. At the very least, it’ll show you where the bulk of your emails exist so that you can tackle some of those older ones that are probably of no use to you anymore.
Unsubscribing from Email
This is one of the easiest and fastest ways to not only clean up the existing mess in your inbox but also to unsubscribe from those you’ve subscribed to. To see those, just click on the “Unsubscribe” category.
Mailstrom is able to identify those incoming emails that you’ve subscribed to, and it offers a feature to unsubscribe for you – or at the very least it’ll send you to the website where you can unsubscribe. Just select the email and click the “Unsubscribe” button.
You have the option to either unsubscribe only, or unsubscribe and delete the email as well.
Making Progress and Additional Features
As you fly your way through cleaning up your email inbox, you’ll see a progress bar at the lower part of the left navigation menu. This area shows how many messages you’ve cleaned out of your inbox today, how many new messages you received, and a percentage representing how much you’ve accomplished already.
It’s very motivating to see the inbox contents drop so rapidly, and it’s satisfying to see just how clean a normal inbox can be. Thankfully with Mailstrom, it’s not as difficult as it could be. The irrational fear that something important might get lost is replaced with a very uplifting revelation that your inbox is never going to be cluttered again.
Paid Features in Mailstrom
You can actually use Mailstrom for free to delete up to 4,000 email messages from your inbox. If you don’t have a huge mess to deal with, this might be enough. However, if you have a mountain of emails to get through like I do, or you want to have a system like Mailstrom to help you maintain the cleanliness of your inbox, then the cheap $49.95 per year full subscriber plan may be worth it. A full subscription lets you manage 10 addresses rather than just 3, and it includes up to 200 automatic rules for managing incoming emails.
If you have a crazy volume of emails every day, automatic rules for keeping the inbox clean can go a long way toward maintaining your inbox and your sanity. And since those rules apply to the categories defined in Mailstrom, it provides you with functionality beyond the filtering provided inside of email services like Gmail itself.
As you can see, organizing your impossibly cluttered inbox doesn’t have to be an impossible task — or even very painful for that matter. Given that email is one of the most commonly used productivity tools on the planet, keeping your inbox smoothly running and effective is one of the easiest ways to also keep yourself as productive as possible.
Source: www.makeuseof.com
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