Ever wonder how to control your email’s Inbox? In this post, I’ll show you how to keep things squared away with your email. Whether you receive 10 a day or 450 (like I do), these steps will help. Plus, I’m going to share something upcoming from Gmail and Yahoo that will aid in this pursuit immensely.

The Mistake Often Made

Before I go into steps you can take to control the Inbox, let me share the number one mistake many people make when dealing with Spam/Junk emails.

Instead of marking a junk email as Junk, aka Spam, people just delete them!

I see this mistake all the time. If you simply delete a junk email, you’ll most likely keep getting junk emails from the same email address. Instead of dealing with the junk one time, you’ll be repeatedly deleting from the same source. One thing to remember: when you do mark something as Junk/Spam, you are blocking that particular email address, not the content of the email. There are times I get 5 exact junk emails all from different email addresses. I have to mark each of them as junk.

How To Control Your Email’s Inbox – Step #2

Wait! What happened to step #1? That step is the one I talked about above – marking spam emails as junk or spam instead of just deleting them.

Step #2 is unsubscribing from email lists to which you no longer want to be on. As an example, let’s say you bought some furniture from Rooms To Go. In the process of buying, you gave them your email address. Now, months later, you’re still receiving emails from them about sales, etc. If you’re at the point where you know you’re not interested in purchasing anything else from them, you should unsubscribe from their list. All reputable companies give you the option to unsubscribe or otherwise make changes to your subscription service. Almost always, this option can be found at the bottom of any email they send.

Never unsubscribe from a list unless you’re positive you actually signed up for it.

Here’s what happens: a hacker/scammer will purchase a list of email addresses. They have no idea what addresses are still correct and which ones aren’t. One of the tricks they will use is to add an “Unsubscribe” option in their emails. When you click “Unsubscribe,” you have confirmed that your email is valid and junk emails will probably increase.

Step #3

Many times, there are emails we need to keep for future interactions. These emails could be receipts for things we’ve purchased or maybe communications from your favorite computer company! (Obviously, that would be Keystone Computer Concepts – 4kcc.com!) Instead of allowing these emails to accumulate in the Inbox, you can create separate folders for them. (Google calls folders “Labels.”)

Once you’ve created folders, you can move emails from the Inbox to the appropriate folder. This will keep your Inbox more organized.

If you look at the very top photo in this post, you’ll see that I had created a folder called “00Yellow.” That’s a good example of what I’m discussing.

Step #4 – How To Control Your Email’s Inbox

Another great way of controlling your email Inbox is to create “Filters.” Filters are processes you make to handle emails automatically for you. Let’s look at some reasons you might use filters.

• You keep getting emails with a particular word or words in the subject line. These are emails you don’t want and you’re tired of marking them Junk/Spam. You can create a filter to automatically put them in your junk/spam folder. This rule would be based on the subject word. For instance, get a lot of emails with the word “Viagra” in the subject? Set the rule to put any of those in Junk. By the way, most email providers allow you to create rules based on other things besides the subject.
• You get emails from Keystone Computer Concepts and you want a rule that will automatically put them in the folder you created for KCC. Naturally, you could create a rule to handle emails from family members, the same way.

Step #5

Facebook, of course, is a very popular Social Media platform. In its settings, you can ask it to email you every time a friend creates a post or comments on something you’ve posted. (There are other choices, as well.) If you have an appreciable number of Facebook friends, this can amount to a lot of emails in a day’s time. Do yourself a favor: go into Facebook Settings, Notifications and change the email settings to “Required notifications” only. Alternatively, you can choose which emails you want to get if you don’t want to eliminate them all (except for the required ones).

How To Control Your Email’s Inbox- Conclusion

In this post, I’ve outlined 5 steps you can take to control your email Inbox. However, you may have noticed that I haven’t told you how to accomplish the steps – at least not in any detail. If you’re wondering why, it’s because the procedures vary from one email client to another. Additionally, there are differences between accomplishing these tasks in a browser-supported email client or a standalone client (e.g., Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, Mac Mail).

Based on the responses I get from this post, I’ll try to help a reader if I know which email client they use.