How to tame your inbox

If your inbox is constantly overflowing with junk, this page will show you how to bring order to the chaos.

Summary

If you don't train a dog you'll ed up with a problem dog. Exactly the same applies to your email, with the result that you waste your time trawling through junk emails, some of them probably malicious, you risk missing something important, and you can never find an email you know your received only last week, let alone last year!

The complete solution is easiest if you're setting up your email from scratch, or migrating to a new email provider with the intention of leaving the old one to fester. If that's too radical for you, there are steps you can take to improve things, or as first steps towards your ultimate goal.

Safety

Always back up your date abefore attempting any reorganisation or reconfiguration.

Introduction

Lots of people have decided messaging systems are better, but which to use? Whatsapp is popular but it went down for almost 6 hours in November 2021, and there are privacy concerns since it insists on swallowing up your entire contacts list! Who knows what it does with it. Telegram is popular in some quarters, but it harbours many unmoderated criminal and other unsavoury groups - definitely not a suitable playground for your kids! Signal is considered pretty secure, and several social media apps include messaging fcilities.

But when some of your contacts use one and some use another you can end up with a plethora of apps to check. It's beautifully summed up in this classic xkcd cartoon. (Many of the systems included you'll never have heard of, some dating back to the early days of the Internet.)

So what's my answer? It's in several parts. If you don't feel able to carry it through to completion you can still get a good measure of benefit. These are the steps in outline:

1. Create at least two different email addresses for different purpose and migrate cotacts you care about to those
2. Either:

   (a) If you use webmail and want to stick with it, set up folders and filters to manage it. But what you can do differs between wembmail providers. Or:

   (b) Use an email client such as Thunderbird or Outlook to manage your emails on your own device, with a much greater level of control.

3. Use a mail archiving program such as Mailstore to archive your emails and provide sophisticated search facilities.

What you can do beyond step 1 on a mobile device may be more limited, but hopefully you can get to step 2(a).

Email isn't encrypted, but for most purposes that doesn't matter. You can always encrypt a confidential document before attaching it to an email. (I'll show you how at the end.)

Email primer

Before getting into the details we need to be sure we understand a few basics.

Internet email as we know it today still rests on a foundation laid in 1982 in a standard known as RFC822. This defines how your email is forwarded from one server to another until it reaches the one hosting your mailbox. There are two ways you can access your mailbox:

• The server hosting your maibox may allow you to manage it through your browser. This is known as webmail. Your mail remains on the server but you can download attachments.

• You manage your email with an app on your PC (such as Outlook or Thunderbird). Either:

  Using IMAP, you manage your email on the server with the app instead of the web iterface, but you can optionally keep local copies of everything so you can work offline. Also, the app may offer greater flexibility than webmail and can manage several email accounts. If you access your email through more than one device, each will see the same.

  Using POP3, the app downloadss all mail and stores it locally, optionally deleting it from the server. But if you access it using more than one device, an email you've read on one will still show as unread on another.

Whether you used IMAP or POP3, big advantages over webmail are:

• The app will provide a consistent user interface to different providers (e.g.Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail).
• A good app will give you much greater flexibility in filtering and managing your email.
• If you choose to store you email locally you won't loose it if you loose access to an email account, but you will have to take responsibility for backing it up. However against that, much more powerful serach facilities are available.

Set up multiple email accounts

The first step is to set up one or more new email accounts which you'll reserve for contacts you care about. Registrations with shopping websites and the like, and perhaps forum and mailing list subscriptions you can maybe leave with your old provider, depending on what state it's in. Or you can set up another email account and keep it for non-personal use.

If you have a work email account you should only use that for work-related activities, in fact that may well be a requirement of your company's acceptable use policy. Likewise if you are self-employed and handle personal information you should certainly use a dedicated email account for that to reduce he risk of a breach of client information.

For most people, two accounts will suffice, one for persoal and the other for no-personal contacts.

There are various providers of free email, including Google (Gmail), Yahoo and Microsoft (Hotmail and Live mail) and th choice is yours. You may wish to review the privacy policy of your chosen provider. Might they use the contents of your emils or you list of contacts to profile you for advertising or other purposes?

Alternatively you can register your own domain (e.g. snizzlewhip-family.me). There are various web hosting providers who will register your domain for you and offer you one or more mailboxes to go with it (e.g. john@snizzlewhip-family.me). The annual cost is not great and it will also allow you to set up your own website under the same domain nme. But if the subscription lapsed through an oversight or (hopefully not) your death or incapacity, you (and potentially your family) would risk loosing your email.

Folders and Filters

Any webmail provider should allow you to set up folders which you can use to organise your email. You might have a folder for family, another for friends, and others for hobby interests or for clubs, societies or other activities or organisations you're involved with.

Gmail works a little differently. All mail is held in a single database and there are no folders, but instead you have categories and labels. Gmail uses machine learning to place each email in one of a few predefined categories. You can't add, modify or delete these. Labels are much more flexible and more useful for our purposes. You can define your own, including sub-labels of an existing label. So functionlly, they are similar to folders except that you can apply multiple labels to an email, useful, for example, if a family member is also a member of one of your clubs.

You can manually file emails in a desired folder (or assign labels in gmail) but the method may vary between providers, in the simplest case, just by dragging and dropping.

Manual filing can be tedious and is probably impractical for emails perhaps dating back years. But most webmail services provide for email filters or rules, which can do the job for you, though the level of control varies considerably between providers. Typically, a filter will allow you to match the sender, recipient, subject and body, or parts of any of those, and specify an action, such as move to a given folder, mark as read, or delete.

A limitation of most webmail providers is that you may well have a fair number of family contacts and even more friends, and creating a filter for each one can be a lot of work. But if you take the next step and manage your email yourself, Thunderbird provides a smarter method as well as a greater range of possible actions.

External links

• Thuderbird download - email client for Windows, MacOS and Linux.
• Mailstore Home - email archiving and search.