Banish email cruft
Overcome email overload with our tips that help you get on top of it
Email. Where would we be without it? Much happier if you believe the numerous surveys that say drowning in the stuff is making us miserable. We’re much more positive about the benefits of email, but we also get tons of it and still struggle to keep it organised.
Leaving all your email in your inbox is fine up to a point, as long as your email app of choice has a powerful search feature. Sadly, most don’t and so either struggle to find anything at all, or spend ages churning through thousands of messages only to turn up what looks like a completely random selection.
There’s another problem with never deleting or archiving email: storage. Whether you keep all your email locally on your Mac or entrust it to a cloud service like iCloud or Gmail, sooner or later you’re going to run out of space. If you send or receive large attachments, that’ll happen sooner rather than later.
There are a number of different techniques for finding and organising messages in both Mail and Gmail. The latter excels at searching through messages, and so we can use its powerful search operators to identify messages we want to process. Both Mail and Gmail provide tools to deal with messages automatically as they are received. In Mail these are called Rules and in Gmail, filters. We’ll show you how to use both to get on top of email.
Thankfully, knocking your email into shape is straightforward and doesn’t take long at all. Kenny Hemphill
Both Mail and Gmail provide tools to deal with messages automatically when they are received