I recently read an article somewhere that one cause of stress can be to have emails clogging up your inbox. Now whilst I cannot honestly say I lay awake at night horrified by visions of endless emails, it is a fact that I do have a lot of emails clogging up my inbox. They are all opened, but I have just let them build up over the years and never got around to deleting them. Like I said, they've been around for "years".
Some go back to 2010. They were emails sent or received around the time of Greg's death, so I was loathe to delete them for sentimental reasons. From then on the emails have mounted up, be it from friends, relatives, companies I've ordered things from, companies I haven't ordered things from, or spam. I reckon they must run into thousands. I've never quite felt like spending an hour or twenty-four going through them individually to see what ought to be kept or what I could delete. To be fair, I neither had the time nor had I lost the will to live.
Over the weekend I had a quite a few hours to kill while I avoided Kay, who has taken up residence in either the lounge or the kitchen on a whim as she revises for a big exam on Tuesday to become a Member of the Royal College of Physicians and get the initials MRCP after her name. Trying to give her peace and quiet to revise meant I had to hunker down somewhere else in the house and not make noise. So I escaped to the study for a whole weekend and sat in front of the laptop. Having killed an hour or two on blogs, facebook, BBC news, the weather, Rightmove (what's my house worth?), ebay (what can I sell?) and a few other websites I frequent, I then got bored. Then I remembered that article and it got me thinking, so I decided to make a start. All part of my "new year and new me" project.
I've already deleted anything further back than 2013. I've kept a few out of sentimentality or necessity or usefulness for the future, but I've deleted thousands already. I've also deleted the TRASH folder too, so they are gone, never to return. Tomorrow I'll start on 2013 and, who knows, I might just have a mere handful of recent ones left in my inbox by the end of the week. I persuaded myself that in all those years I have never gone back to look at those past emails, so what's the point of keeping them? Answers on a postcard (or email perhaps).
6 comments:
Well done you, you must be feeling a lot lighter as a result of this. Not sure I can quite bring myself to do it, though as you say, what on earth are they all being kept for? I have various junk filters which should be systematically getting rid of all the spam ones, but the rest are building up... one day! And Happy New Year xx
Well done! It’s a freeing thing getting rid of the things that have a hold on us. I need to go through clothes something fierce.
Good for you! I try to delete as I go and do a complete delete session every two weeks. It feels so good to hit delete. Smile. Hope your new year is full of good things.
I lost my entire email record when my old computer 'died'. Did I miss anything? No. I keep very few now, and don't put any reliance on anything that is there - if I feel I need to keep a record of something, I will transfer it to a file doc. I delete daily, and delete from the delete box as well!
There are ways of grouping all e-mails from one particular source together. Let's say all emails from your bank or from Amazon. Then you can just run through them all - deleting them all at once. One way to do this is to use the "search" facility within your e-mail front page.
Oh how I empathise with this. I have friends emails dating back over two years. I am good at deleting other stuff though. My gmail is divided into three boxes - primary are the ones I want, social is facebook, twitter etc. which I delete as I go, and promotions which I bulk delete every week. Good luck to Kay.
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