Ask The Techspert: How To Clean Your Email Inbox

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Buckle up! With Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the entire giving season upon us, marketers from all industries have already started increasing the number of marketing emails they send to their subscribers. Want to avoid missing out on deals from businesses you like?  Don’t want to miss information from organizations you care about?  Then it’s time to clean out your inbox!  

I have thousands of emails. What to do?

Rest assured that you are not alone. According to recent data, the number of emails sent and received worldwide in 2021 was 319.6 billion per day. This figure is projected to increase to 376.4 billion daily emails by 2025. With this large number of emails piling up daily in our inbox, keeping it clean and decluttered can be challenging.

For people with overflowing inboxes, email providers (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.) make it simple to delete emails in bulk and unsubscribe from any email list. Here are a few techniques to clean up your email inbox while minimizing the number of relevant emails deleted:

• Delete emails sent more than two months ago.
• Filter emails with keywords, select all and delete. This approach will ensure you keep your relevant emails intact.

The picture below displays standard key areas, available for most email providers, used to help delete emails in bulk.

Another way to clean up your email is with email cleaner software. You can learn more about these tools from this article. Although these tools can help clean up your inbox faster, they are often not free and come with a learning curve.

Are you receiving many Senior Planet emails?

Senior Planet offers multiple email newsletter subscriptions based on location or interest areas. When signing up for our newsletters, you can select which newsletters you’d like to receive.

If you receive many emails from Senior Planet, you subscribed to more than one of our newsletters. Fortunately, Senior Planet offers a way to manage your current newsletter subscriptions. To change your preferences regarding newsletter subscriptions from Senior Planet, do the following:

• Open any email from Senior Planet.
• Scroll to the bottom of the email.
• Click on update your preferences to select the newsletter(s) you want to keep receiving and unselect the ones to unsubscribe.

When and how to unsubscribe

Just deleting emails from marketers is not enough.  Delete ten emails today, and you will receive ten more tomorrow. If the marketer is a business you are not interested in receiving emails from, then unsubscribing is the way to go. Note that you might have subscriptions to multiple email lists from the same marketer. You need to unsubscribe to each one of the email lists individually. 

Once unsubscribed, you should no longer receive emails from that specific email list. To unsubscribe from any email list, you only need to look for the unsubscribe button and click it. The unsubscribe button is often at the top or bottom section of the email, as shown in the picture below:

Do not click unsubscribe from a spam/phishing email. For this type of email, only report them as spam.

You can learn more about keeping your email safe by revisiting our previous article “Avoid Email Scams This Holiday Season.”

Email Inbox Tips

Stay on top of keeping your email inbox clean by following these few tips:

• Start by investing time to clean up your email inbox to start fresh.
• Once the inbox is clean, try to keep the inbox count at zero. Whenever you check your email, read the important ones and delete the ones that are not before finishing the session.
• Ask yourself if you’d like to receive emails from a website or business before giving away your email.

Golden rule: Just because a website has one good article doesn’t mean it deserves your email address.

Leave a comment below with any questions or input that you might have.

Techspert Jonathan is Senior Planet’s Sr. Digital Community Relations and Product Specialist and a former Senior Planet San Antonio technology trainer. He is also an iOS developer with a background in Information Systems and Cyber Security.

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