Cleaning up my Email

I collect email addresses.  I have a bunch for different purposes and one of the reasons I ended up going that route is because the main ones that I use were getting too cluttered over the years with random junk, subscriptions, spam and other tomfoolery that would occur.  So, instead of cleaning up and organizing my email so that the static didn't become too much I would just create another email address for a given purpose.

For instance, I have one email address just for my Fantasy Football stuff.  I have a dedicated email address that I attached to this blog for anyone who read it and felt like responding or for advertising requests.

As you can see, I'm one of those idiots that instead of fixing something so that it can work better for me I create multiple somethings which all end up steamrolling downhill and ending up in the exact same spot to varying degrees.

So recently I have decided that I really need to clean up my email so that everything is neat and concise and I am getting all the information that I need to be getting and the clutter goes away because it serves no purpose other than to convince me to ignore my problems for another day.

Knowing that the cleanup process was not going to be quick nor easy (several of these email address have been collecting stuff since gmail was invite only) I turned to external sources for help.  After talking to friends and asking for recommendations I was pointed in the direction of a website and an app called Unroll.me.

What this site does is it takes the emails in your inbox and asks you what you would like to do with it.  You have three options to choose from: 1 - You can Unsubscribe from the email; 2 - you can keep it in your inbox; 3 - you can put it in a daily "rollup" which is just an email that gets sent showing you all the emails that are in your "rollup."

The rollup feature is pretty cool honestly.  When the emails come in they automatically get marked as read and then moved into a newly created folder creatively called Unroll.me.  From there, through the magic of the internet, voodoo happens and you get your daily email (you can change the frequency of these emails and the time of day that they come in) and if you actually want to see the information you can click on it and it will open up.  If nothing interests you from your Rollup then you just delete that one email and all is good.  It definitely helps cut the clutter in your inbox and makes everything more manageable.

At any point you can go in and manage where your emails are going, weather you want to remove something from the Rollup or from Unsubscribe and put it back in your Inbox, etc.  This has been an absolute life saver in terms of getting me on the right track towards Inbox Freedom.

My ultimate plan is to eventually weed things out myself and organize through the folder system that gmail has and tackling that goal is going to be a ton easier because of Unroll.me.

From here my main goal is I need to go through all of the folders that I have set up and delete what is no longer needed, set up new folders that make sense for me now and organizing items from my inbox to auto sort themselves so that I can look at them later if the need arises. 

Also, unsubscribing from mailing lists is sometimes the biggest pain the ass that there is.  You can go through the motions but then like 2 months later you start to get emails again because companies hate us.

I'm fairly certain this bored the hell out of all of you and if you actually read this far BRAVO.

I spent I don't know how much time typing out something stupid about a process I am going through instead of actually going through my emails and deleting and organizing.

Long Story Short: Boredom!