I'll leave directions here for when a sudden burst of motivation blindsides you.
- Sort by sender
- Unsubscribe from sender
- Delete everything from that sender
- Repeat until clean
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
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ADHD
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This is actually useful, thank you!
Mark all as read, transfer all to archive
And if something really important gets caught in that, don't worry, they'll e-mail again. If they don't, it's clearly not that important.
This is why I email asking if people reject my plans during vacation. No rejection? Thanks! Don't like what I'm doing? Well here's the paper trail showing you were informed.
Me every time I get back from a vacation at work.
Unsubscribing to shit you don't care about, using the search on the desktop client to be able to select 100s of emails and delete them at a time, and automatic filters are your friend.
And like someone else said, if it's over like a month old and unread, chuck it in an "archive" folder and mark all as read. They'll still be there if you absolutely need them, but won't be cluttering stuff up.
Don't try to manage it from the phone app, it's a pain in the ass.
Caveat: I say all this with even more unread than your picture, and having not done any cleanup of my inboxes (besides setting filters on my work one) in years. I just remember what did work for me the last time I was on top of my inbox for a few years in college.
Yeah, gmail sucks these days. Their filters are crap. I moved to my own email server so I could have better spam filtering and customized rules to filter things.
I don't do self hosted email but I do use fastmail now and the make rule from email is a feature I've found myself using nearly daily. On top of being able to just shut off an alias that gets sold/ found in a breach has been a life saver.
My PB
Whoa, I thought I couldn't be bested.
If we had a triathlon that included open browser tabs and old friends whose messages I haven't responded to, I think I have a good chance of medaling.
i cleaned my inbox a few weeks ago. i now have five emails total in there, which is just the stuff i haven't done something about yet. it feels amazing everytime i look at it.
i also got new medication around that time. i'm sure that's a coincidence.
19,483 here, and that's just my main email. 💀
For what it's worth I think it's just because I use email in my browser and with no notifications, so I don't feel the urge to clear my notifications like I would with a phone app. Also at some point once it got stupidly large I decided I wanted to see how high it could get just for fun.
Mine forces me to keep it at zero all the time.
every Wednesday my habitica pops up telling me to sort my new email inbox. left the g00g a year or two ago and been trying to stay on top of keeping this bitch clean
Got a custom icon set on my phone, no big red number/notifcation to disturb my day!
I've been working on cleaning mine out. I've got it from 13k down to 2k, which feels good, but I still have a ways to go.
Hey, hey you - you don't owe an email anything. Just leave it unread.
Feeling inspired to go unsubscribe from a bunch of junk mail and clean up old mail? Go for it.
But you shouldn't waste a second of your time feeling obligated to deal with emails sent largely by automated marketing campaigns.
At work I spend time to organize my inbox, its a necessity, on my personal email, I get security alerts & banking into separate folders, that's about it, I don't waste a moments thought on the unread count.
Recently I set up a new personal email address with a custom domain for important shit and I gave it to close friends and family. I keep my free email addresses for shit like newsletters, non critical logins etc. That new email maybe gets one email a day so it’s very easy to maintain inbox zero. But the other email addresses I can’t be bothered to clean.
Also having an email with a custom domain makes it very easy to migrate to another email provider if I ever need to. Since I can migrate the address with me.
What? How? Just unsubscribe from shit you don’t want. Bin it all then tackle each mail as it lands.
Damn, I cannot stand an unread notification.
Yeah, another "just do something", as if I'm not telling it myself enough.
Yeah, I'll just commit myself to doing something now, instead of putting it off until I forget about it.
🫠