Do you have a full inbox with unread emails, advertisements and newsletters that you signed up for six years ago? Then it might be time to do a major cleaning of your mailbox. We give you a number of tips.
4 tips to clean up your mail
You probably receive daily emails that you do not use at all. You leave them or throw them away immediately. So get a broom through your inbox and clean up that long list of useless emails and spam. We give you tips on how to do that, and how to keep it tidy afterwards.
1. Delete unread emails
Keeping an orderly inbox is difficult. You probably have a lot of unopened emails in your inbox, or emails that you open but don’t even read. This all takes up unnecessary space and it is more difficult not to miss an important email.
Therefore, delete some emails. You do this by selecting several at the same time. How that works usually speaks for itself in a mail app. Do you want to delete multiple mails at the same time in apps such as Gmail and Outlook? Then long press an email, then you can select several. In the default iOS Mail app, first tap Edit in the top right corner.
2. Unsubscribe from promotional emails
While selecting emails, do you encounter advertisements that you never read, but often receive? Then it can pay to unsubscribe. To do this, open an email and scroll all the way down. You will often see a small button here with ‘unsubscribe’ or ‘unsubscribe’.
Tap here to be redirected to the website where you can confirm your choice again. If you receive a lot of promotional e-mails, this may be a lot of work, but you will see that your inbox remains a lot tidier afterwards. Another quick method is to select all promotional emails and move them to the ‘junk’ or ‘spam’ folder. Your mail app will therefore recognize future emails from the same sender as junk.
3. Create folders
To keep an overview, it is wise to divide your mailbox into folders. For example, have you booked a holiday and do you always receive information about it? Then create a folder ‘Vacation’ to keep everything together. Even if you want to quickly check your data, you can quickly find it that way. Select the mails that belong in it, choose move and then the correct folder.
You create a folder by, for example, tapping ‘New folder’ in the side menu in Outlook. Gmail really doesn’t work with folders but with labels. You can create labels yourself by choosing ‘create label’ in the menu. You can attach multiple labels to one mail, so that it can also be found under different labels.
4. Set rules
If you’ve deleted unnecessary emails, unsubscribed from promotional emails, created folders and organized everything, the trick is to keep it tidy now. Fortunately, most e-mail services help you with that. It is possible to set rules, so that mails from a specific sender or with a specific subject automatically and directly end up in the correct folder.
Setting rules is often done in no time and is in a logical place in most email apps. You set rules in Gmail by opening an email in your browser. Click on the three dots at the top right and choose ‘filter messages like this’.
Here you fill in characteristics by which the e-mails can be recognized. In Outlook, click with your right mouse button on an email and then on ‘Create rule’ to move emails that meet the conditions you have set to a specific folder.
More email tips
On iPhone we often share tips to keep your mailbox as clear as possible. For example, we explain how to set notifications only for important emails with VIP contacts and we give some tips about useful Gmail functions.