Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.
Every night, between when I go to bed and when I get up, I get about 25 emails. To answer your question, no, I’m not nearly important enough to be getting emails in the middle of the night.
Those emails are all newsletters, or Spam, or Ticketmaster trying to sell me Jonas Brothers tickets just because I went to 19 of their concerts. The vast majority of the email I get is of absolutely no interest to me – and I don’t think I’m alone.
Combating that kind of email is great for your sanity (fewer emails = fewer nervous breakdowns), and keeps you from having to deal with these emails over and over. There are a few ways to make it easier on yourself, and to either get the emails out completely, or at least get them to go somewhere they won’t bother you anymore.
The easiest thing to do is just to filter out those emails, and make it so they never get into your inbox in the first place. If you get emails from a particular person or company (like Ticketmaster) frequently, it’s worth a minute or two of your time to set up a filter or rule to either delete those messages automatically, or at least have them routed to their own folder where you can deal with them later. Just about every email client allows this – Just Google “whateveryourclient’snameis filters” and you’ll figure it out.
There are a couple of tricks, using your actual email address, that can make that process even easier. If you’re johnsmith@gmail.com, you’re also john.smith@gmail.com, j.ohnsmith@gmail.com, johnsmith+bananas@gmail.com, and every other iteration of dots and plus signs you can think of. So, for things like newsletters or almost-spam, sign up with those iterations of your email address, and then filter out anything going to, say, jo.hnsmith@gmail.com to go straight to the trash.
Of course, the easiest thing to do is just never to give these people any semblance of your email address at all. That’s as simple as can be, thanks to Mailinator. Mailinator basically gives you a disposable email address that has no password, no security, nothing—just an inbox. I can give websites the email address david@mailinator.com, go check that inbox, and then leave. Then, ten minutes later, you too could be david@mailinator.com.
Mailinator should never, ever be used for anything remotely personal or private, but it’s great if you want to sign up for something but don’t trust it with your email address.
The best happy medium for all this is called Other Inbox, and is actually a really cool tool. You sign up, and then create an unlimited number of disposable email addresses—all of which come to your regular account. You can send messages from Other Inbox if you need to, but it’s really designed for grouping all the annoying messages you get.
It filters and sorts notifications for things like Twitter and Facebook, will send a message to your regular email every once in a while to let you know what it’s getting, and just keeps all the junk and semi-junk out of your inbox. I like Other Inbox a lot, because it keeps things like coupons, new Twitter followers, and the like out of my way, but they’re still around if I want them.
Your inbox should be only for things you need to see, and deal with, right now. It’s not a place for junk, and the more junk builds up, the more at least I start to lose my mind. But there is hope, folks. I promise.
How do you keep the crap out of your inbox?
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