ZMI’s Email Manifesto
Like so many, I’ve had my primary email at Gmail since I got out of school back in ’06. For years I was diligent. Every message received was a message read. But at some point long ago, I started asking myself,
“Do I really need to click on every facebook notification? I can see the subject and the message preview. Is all that clicking absolutely necessary?”
Basically, I got lazy.
As the years went on and I signed up for more and more stuff, the automated emails just came in quicker and quicker. My unread count grew and grew – first to 100, then to 500, then to well over 1,000.
Last May, when my unread count was breaking 1,700, I decided it was time to regain control of my inbox. I began poking around gmail and found by searching ‘is:unread’, I could pull up all my unread messages. I was moments away from moving all those unreads straight into the trash, but then it hit me,
“Maybe I’m not so comfortable with blindly deleting years of unread emails. Who knows, there might be something important in there.”
While starring blankly at that familiar heading 1 – 50 of thousands, I noticed that most of my unread email was really from a small group of automated senders. So, I thought,
“I might be able to get a better picture if I could get a view of my inbox grouped by sender. Viewing by sender might shrink the list to a number I wouldn’t mind sifting through.”
I did a few quick searches and realized that so many of these sneaky automated bastards send you mail from multiple addresses. It quickly became apparent that I would need an even better filter.
The solution was obvious,
“If I could group all my unreads by domain rather than by individual sender, I could shrink 1,000′s of unread emails into a pretty short list.”
I immediately began googling for a mail client that could group senders by domain. Even better, one that would allow me to dispose of the unwanted unreads from that view. An extensive search proved that there was no such tool in existance…. Nothing even close.
And from that moment, ZeroMyInbox was born.
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