Email Organization

[Midou]

Recently I've read an article about gaining some insights into a person based on how tidy their email inbox is. After looking over at my 3 expanding and uncared for inbox's, made me wonder how other Smogoners organize their email and how many accounts they employ for their assorted purposes.

Someone with a tidy inbox probaby manages their life well, while an inbox overflowing with open emails may have trouble prioritizing. Also no matter how neat a guy is, if he never deletes a single email, he will probably be emotional and sentimental in his relationships.

As mentioned above, I regularly use 3 email accounts. 1 for personal/business, one for stuff that deals with online transactions and real life money (payapl, ebay, bank accounts), and the last one for forwarding spam to and gaming accounts. Currently all of them have over 100+ emails from stuff I subscribe to that I haven't been clearing up among other random stuff (not including junk). They're poorly filtered and cluttered due to my online life not caring about email much. However, looking to clean them up this week! Particularly the businessy email as I hope to start an online business and start couchsurfing again.

A different but related aspect is email addresses themselves. I'm sure many of you have emails from your past that are slightly embarrassing to write down on forms or share with others. Just googling "What your email says about you" will bring up 57 million hits with a multitude of articles on it.

Hence, how do you handle your email? Is your inbox tidy? Multiple accounts? Opinion on your email address(es)?

EDIT: Changed title as my focus wasn't actually on the article but how others organize their email.

 

[cookie]

no point deleting emails when you have practically limitless storage

 

[popemobile]

I have close to 4000 emails for one of my accounts and it takes up less than 10% of the total storage. IDK where you found that article but it's stupid as hell

 

[Zacchaeus]

no point deleting emails when you have practically limitless storage

This. Also, I never use mine so it's as cluttered as it gets. But what if somebody gets hundreds of messages a day, does this say that they have bad character because they get lots of E-mail? Obviously not.This is total bullshit though

Ask rey how many E-mail addresses he has

 

[supermarth64]

no point deleting emails when you have practically limitless storage

Pretty much this. It's fun to look back at some stuff and think of how much of a dumbass you were before.

 

[Midou]

Eh, I took the article's actual guesstimations with a grain of salt. Nothing like this can have hard and fast rules regardless. Somebody getting hundreds of email can mean multiple things; client emails, rss feeds, etc. Never assumed it was in any way bad, especially if they have adequate filters.

As for deleting email, I do it for organization. In the backlog of my early emails I usually have a bunch of "registration successful" emails that are pretty handy to have when searching up account info and stuff. Otherwise it's deleted or filtered to an appropriate sub-inbox.

 

[Veedrock]

The amount of junk I get tells me I put up with too much shit.

I block it all just the same.

 

[AJers]

Hmm, my work e-mail is almost obsessively organized, I have folders and subfolders for pretty much everything; but I would blame that on mostly because I get around 50+ e-mails that I have to respond to (or follow-up on)...

I hardly ever log into (much less use/organize) any of my other e-mails... but when I do I'm a deleting mo-fo on them (I hate when my inbox says I have unread messages, I may just be a little neurotic about that...)

But I wouldn't say that it describes my life or how I organize my life?

 

[Renosaur]

1. Select all email.

2. Mark as 'read'.

My daily email routine. There's only a handful that I actually open

 

[whistle]

i think that article is absolutely correct, ladies you know how to contact me.

but to answer your question, most people i know have at least two emails (school + personal) and most people have a third at least (e-commerce/etc). lots of my friends use email forwarding to get all the school/personal emails in one place since those are the ones you want to check often. i personally use thunderbird with a bunch of folders that divide the emails based on what section of my life they concern, i.e. different folders for different classes, dorm emails, clubs/teams, etc.

makes it a little bit easier when a lot of unread messages come, but the main benefit is that if i set my filters properly, all my folders are basically like my top 20 email search terms. if i'm studying for a midterm (which reminds me.... ochem tomorrow... zzz) it's easy to just go to that class folder then yay all my relevant emails are there!

btw for people who use thunderbird, i used to have this extension that put gmail's search syntax into thunderbird ("from: x" or "to: abcd")... anyone know what it's called or how you can make this happen? i hate the new thunderbird version's built in search.

 

[DM]

no point deleting emails when you have practically limitless storage

I have somehow managed to fill 31% of my gmail storage space. It has gotten to the point where everything loads much slower because I have so much shit.

"Practically" limitless, yes.

 

[Ryner]

I have multiple email accounts but I only use one.

 

[Brammi]

I have two email accounts. One that my parentals know about and one they don't. The first is never checked and the second is checked much more often.

 

[Killah]

the last time I deleted my emails was october 2007

 

[Obsessed]

Talk about reading way too much into something.

 

[Mountain Dewgong]

Both my uni and personal gmail are kept spotless, but I recently looked at my older hotmail... Turns out facebook is a bit of a killer, since 2008 I had received 11384 messages from facebook. Was a fun experience deleting them!

 

[Brammi]

You do know there is an option in fb to turn of email notifications.

 

[Renosaur]

You do know there is an option in fb to turn of email notifications.

this, lol. Especially when you first join FB, you get swamped in the first few days

 

[Firestorm]

I don't sort or delete messages in my personal or work account. Might turn out to be an issue at work as there's definitely a limit and it's POP3.... I do delete newsletters though. I forward my school, GMail, personal domain, and basically everything but work to my personal Hotmail.

Who needs sorting and folders when you have

You do know there is an option in fb to turn of email notifications.

Specifically signed up for Facebook at first to make it stop asking me to join Facebook.

 

[masterful]

I don't even empty my spam folder. Pressing the button is just too inconvenient when you get NOTHING out of it

 

[Ramblin Wreck]

Anything like this that people claim to be a "window to the personality" needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Yes, it may provide some insight, and in conjunction with other such clues it may help tell the whole story, but something as complex as personality can't be boiled down to just one area, especially one as novel and small as email organization. I'd be willing to wager that most of the time if you asked someone to think about how their inbox is organized and why, their answer will provide a greater insight into their personality than trying to fit their method of organization into a particular personality.