It's Time To Win The War Against Your Inbox!

I’m sure there are more than a few resources out there designed to help all of us manage one of the most daunting things in our modern lives – our email inboxes – but since I’ve never actually used any of those resources, I figured I’d throw my hat in the ring as well and share my management tactics.

Over the years I have amassed a number of different email addresses, both personal and professional, and in the interest of making sure I don’t miss out on a single contact, I still maintain nearly all of them. From the AOL email addresses I used in college to the ones I manage on a shared server today, each one reminds me of a different time in my life, serves a different purpose and delivers content that I am still interested in reading.

Whether you have one email address, or way too many like I do, here are some simple steps you can take to make sure your inbox and its content are manageable:

First and foremost, if you are lucky enough to have just one email address, please feel free to skip down to the next paragraph, but if you are like most of us, you have more than one email address. You may have so many email addresses that you don’t know what to do with them. I want you to pick one of them – maybe it is the most professional, or maybe it is the easiest to check because it’s the one on your phone – but either way, choose one email address and then set up a forward to it from all of your other email addresses. Ideally, do this in a manner that allows you to reply back to each email from any of your email addresses, but if not, the process is still manageable.

Once you have everything coming in to just one email address, it is time to get ready for battle. It is not going to be easy – it is going to get frustrating and feel really repetitive at times, but there are all sorts of scammers and spammers, phishers and peddlers and they want nothing more than to see you drowning in unwanted emails. The only way you are going to get your inbox to a manageable level is going to be for you to go to war against all those unwanted emails.

The first thing you can do to fight back is to make sure you continue to protect yourself. You are going to be opening a lot of emails as part of this process, but you need to remember, above all else, that every time you see an email you think is a security threat, delete it immediately. Don’t even try to open it on any device. There is no way to manage or stop these emails, but give yourself peace of mind by deleting them right out the gate.

Unfortunately, even after doing that, you are still going to have a lot of unwanted email left in your inbox. Great deals on cars, great deals on loans, great deals on all sorts of pharmaceuticals and great deals on just about anything else you can think of - all of them cluttering your inbox. If you use your email addresses for business at all, it can be even worse - you get a ton of email trying to sell you products and services as well as a ton of emails about conferences, seminars, webcasts and all sorts of white papers. It may seem the best thing to do is to simply delete all of these emails, too, but sadly, if you just delete all of these unwanted emails, you are going to keep getting more and more of them. It’s almost like the more you delete, the more they send!

But, if you fight back by taking the time to open each of these emails, scroll down to the bottom and unsubscribe, over time, you will start to witness a miracle! Your inbox will actually start receiving less and less of these unwanted and unsolicited emails. You are always going to see new ones and they may come in waves, but overall, if you keep up the good fight and continue to unsubscribe, you will definitely see a positive difference.

I’ll say it again, just to drive the point home. If you think it’s a security threat, don’t open the email. All other emails, open them, no matter how uninterested you are in what they are selling. Scroll down to the bottom until you see a link to unsubscribe. It might be a little hidden or be a linked image, but it should be there. It won’t be there EVERY time, but when you see it, click on it. You should sometimes get a message that you have been automatically unsubscribed simply by clicking on the link, and other times, you’ll be asked to provide your email address. Make sure you know which address the email was sent to (this is for those of you with multiple email addresses) and be sure you enter that email address into the field correctly. Make sure you click unsubscribe and stick around long enough to make sure you see a confirmation that you have been subscribed in some way before backing out of the browser window. Keep in mind that these spammers are hoping that you’ll miss a step or get so frustrated with their unsubscribe process that you’ll simply quit trying.

After you feel you’ve successfully unsubscribed, go back to the original email and scroll down further than that first unsubscribe link you clicked. Chances are, you are going to find a second or maybe even third unsubscribe link down there. This is because there may be an unsubscribe link for the campaign, then one for the spammer, and one for the company that is actually selling the product. If you don’t subscribe from each and every unsubscribe link on each of these unwanted emails, you’ll probably still keep getting email from them. Be sure to go back to each email and ensure you’ve unsubscribed from each link.

And, lastly, while you’ve deleted the obvious security threat emails and unsubscribed from all the unwanted emails, there is still one more step – taking a good hard look at the remaining emails – the ones you supposedly do want to receive. As you read each one of these emails, give a little thought to whether you really do read it or if you really want to keep receiving it. If you do, by all means, just let it keep coming, but if you don’t really read it – if you tend to just skim it or delete it pretty quickly - you may as well just unsubscribe from that email as well.

If you do just these few things – delete the scary stuff immediately, unsubscribe from EVERY unsubscribe link in an unwanted email, and unsubscribe from the stuff you don’t really read, you will soon find that your inbox is actually not only manageable, but you might actually enjoy checking your email again!