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.)

External links

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