Old, Old Email
Aug. 14th, 2014 11:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogIt's hard for me to keep my email under control. I typically have one to two thousand messages in an unread state in my inbox. That's not to say I haven't read them; usually I set message back to 'unread' after looking at them if I want to do something else with them later, or don't want to forget them. Of course, there's a lot of spam and stuff there too that I just ignore.
Anyway, I started today from the other end. Clicking 'oldest' on Gmail brought me to mail from as far back as 2009. Which I've been mass-deleting a hundred at a time after giving it a once over. I think this will be done in bite-sized bits though. I've found an array of mail from people I don't see anymore and miss, people I don't see anymore and don't necessarily want reminders of, and people who are dead. Individually they're not a big deal. I whip up a filter for them and archive the message if I want to keep them, or delete them if I don't. But I think doing a lot of it at a time would be a little wearisome.
And only a handful of the messages I thus delete are not marked as read, so it doesn't even feel like I'm making that much progress! Though I do get to see the 'number of items in inbox' drop significantly, and that's satisfying.
Anyway, I started today from the other end. Clicking 'oldest' on Gmail brought me to mail from as far back as 2009. Which I've been mass-deleting a hundred at a time after giving it a once over. I think this will be done in bite-sized bits though. I've found an array of mail from people I don't see anymore and miss, people I don't see anymore and don't necessarily want reminders of, and people who are dead. Individually they're not a big deal. I whip up a filter for them and archive the message if I want to keep them, or delete them if I don't. But I think doing a lot of it at a time would be a little wearisome.
And only a handful of the messages I thus delete are not marked as read, so it doesn't even feel like I'm making that much progress! Though I do get to see the 'number of items in inbox' drop significantly, and that's satisfying.
