Public Library Of Youngstown & Mahoning County: Tips For Cleaning Up Your Inbox

Press release from the Public Library of Youngstown & Mahoning County:

Kelly

June 17th, 2021

Is your email overwhelming?  Do you have so many messages that you don’t know where or how to start reading them?  Do you have so much junk mail that you are missing or losing important messages?  It might be time to do a little tidying up in your inbox.

I find that keeping my inbox small and organized really helps.  I store important messages in folders for easy access, I delete the extraneous messages, and I fight to keep junk mail at bay.  This will keep your email inbox working for you, and make it far easier to find and respond to important messages.

Here are some super-simple tips that you can do in just a few minutes each day:

Read through your email inbox.  If an email doesn’t require any action from you, doesn’t contain important information, or isn’t anything that you want to save, then trash it.  This would usually be junk mail, newsletters, auto-responses, notifications, ads, etc.  Click the “Delete” button or the tiny picture of a trash can on the subject line.

If you change your mind, search for the message in your Trash folder and restore it or drag it back to your inbox.

Check to see if you can Unsubscribe from unimportant, repetitive emails.  But be sure to check on the sender first.  If the email address looks fishy (someone you don’t know, a company whose name is misspelled, etc.), it’s safest to just delete it.  Or you can mark it as “phishing” and “report it” to the email provider.

If you know the sender (for instance, if you purchased something online and you are now on the company’s mailing list), open the email and look for the “Unsubscribe” button.  It’s typically down at the bottom and very tiny.  Take some time to unsubscribe from emails you know you won’t be using anymore.

If you have an inbox full of junk, you can delete the whole lot and start fresh with an empty inbox!  Here’s how to delete more than one message at a time:

(click to enlarge thumbnail)

Now that you have a cleaner inbox, you can find the important emails much faster and easier.  If an email is critical (requires immediate action or reply), then act on it now.  Save in a folder or delete.

If you want to keep the email, or if the email contains information that you will need to act on later, you can file it.  Create a new folder (give it a descriptive name so you know what it’s for) and drag and drop the message in the folder.

If you know that certain messages will always need to go into a specific folder, you can “create a rule” so that all messages by a certain sender (or with a certain subject line, whatever) are automatically sorted by the email provider into a folder you created for it.

Take some time every day to sort your inbox, act on items and delete old messages.  Soon, it will become second-nature!

Kelly

Kelly is a librarian at the Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County. As the Adult Programming Specialist, her focus is bringing adults the library programs they love.  (Kids can’t have ALL the fun!).  She reads strictly nonfiction and picture books.  She believes that anything you could ever need or want is located somewhere in the library.  Including friends.

This press release was produced by the Public Library of Youngstown & Mahoning County. The views expressed here are the author’s own.