Email has been the biggest driver of creating additional items on my LIST for the last few years. Well, ok, more than that!!
I started my Yahoo! Mail account in 1999 and have been a user ever since. I have so much in my email account. Looking through old folders and emails is always a walk down memory lane.
I sometimes long for the days of getting real letters in the mail. As a kid, I would get quite a few from relatives and friends in different parts of the country. I have saved a few letters over the years. I have some that were hand written by my Great Grandmother; letters from my Dad that he mailed from the airport each week the year he worked in DC and we were in Buffalo, NY; and a lot of letters that my husband and I exchanged during college (when email was still relatively new!).
As much as I love the memories that emails can capture, if each message was really a physical piece of paper or a photograph, I would have run out of storage space long ago!
The last few years, in an effort to keep my mailbox more manageable, I have created a lot of folders. It has kept my inbox (sort of) manageable, but it was just an easy way to put off the process of cleaning up the mailbox overall.
Not unlike when people are coming over and you
One item on my LIST for a while has been to really deep clean my email. I want to do something with the photos I have been sent from friends and family. I want to capture the emails I have from my Grandfather so they are never lost. I want to delete messages I wrote like "Great, see you soon!" in response to meeting confirmations.
So, each day, I plan to spend a few minutes going through my messages and deleting things I don't need, storing ones I want to keep and overall reducing the volume of messages that have collected over the last few years.
One service I have come to count on in this effort over the last few months is unrollme.com. They provide one email each day that contains all of the marketing messages I have chosen for them to "rollup" for me each day. As defined on their website - "The Rollup is the revolutionary inbox superhero that helps you achieve a clean inbox. It combines your selected subscriptions and organizes them into one convenient daily digest email."
This is an unsolicited endorsement of their service based on my experiences to date. I was a very early adopter of just about everything online so the list of companies, online stores, and newsletters I have signed up for over the years is quite staggering. I would literally get a hundred or more emails a day. This service scans my email and provides a list of the emails it thinks I might want to either rollup - or unsubscribe from. It make the process so organized with very little effort on my part. Ok, you do have to get past the "something is scanning my inbox" issue - but the fact that I can read just the one email a day is totally worth it to me! I also took advantage of how easy they make it to unsubscribe from sites or newsletters that are no longer relevant in my life.
So, between continuing with unrollme.com and my own work, my email should be in much better shape with the start of the new school year.
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