The estimated reading time for this post is 6 minutes
If you have an email account, you’re probably one of these three types of people:
- Those who have achieved an empty inbox
- Those who aspire to an empty inbox but haven’t achieved it
- Those who don’t aspire to an empty inbox
Advantages of Having an Empty Inbox
If you have an empty or nearly empty inbox you probably either don’t get many emails, have a system of organization or both. You may have moved important emails to folders you’ve created to stay organized and on top of your inbox. Having an empty inbox can show you’re in control of your life. Pending matters have been dealt with, filed and sorted.
Advantages of Having an Empty Inbox
Some advantages of having an empty inbox:
- Organization
- Feeling in Control
- Not missing important emails
- Efficiency
Why Not Have an Empty Inbox?
But not everyone believes an empty inbox is or should be the ultimate organizational goal. Some people believe in never deleting a single email. Ever.
Many people use their email inbox as a virtual filing system, emailing themselves reminders or important information to be stored there in the Cloud. They can have access to this information from anywhere they are logged into their email accounts. They don’t bother to sort their email messages into folders because they know that searching will help them find what they need.
By not clearing out your email inbox you can keep information that may not seem important now but becomes important later. You may retain email receipts, registration information, messages from people who are no longer in your life, and emails that take you on a nostalgia trip back in time.
You can find a lot of lost information by searching a cluttered inbox using keywords, dates, names of senders, etc. Tools such as Unroll.Me and Boomerang can help you keep control of your inbox as the number of messages continues to multiply daily.
➫ Learn about how to easily unsubscribe from promotional emails you don’t want and get a daily digest for those you do want: Unroll.me – Get Control of Your Inbox!
➫ Find out how to bring emails to your attention later: Boomerang – Put Off Today’s Gmail Until Later.
Advantages of Not Having an Empty Inbox
Those who don’t clear out their inboxes can benefit from:
- Access to information from anywhere
- Free Cloud storage for information
- Not spend time clearing out their inboxes
- Finding information efficiently by searching
Poll
Do you have an empty inbox? Vote in The Wonder of Tech poll and let us know:
Security
If you do use your email account to keep important information, be sure to keep it secure. Use 2-Step Verification to protect against others using your password to access your email account. Log out of your account when using a shared computer.
[note]To learn how to protect your accounts better see, How to Use 2-Step Verification for an Extra Layer of Password Protection [/note]
Don’t give your password out to others, especially strangers on the street who have a microphone and a camera:
Achieving an Empty Inbox — Inbox Zero
The concept of Inbox Zero was discussed by Merlin Mann in a Google Tech Talk in 2007. In this video, Mann explains the benefits of Inbox Zero and how to achieve it:
Mann describes Inbox Zero as a cleaning out of not only your inbox but of your mind from the distractions a cluttered email account can bring.
According to Mann in a comment to Inbox Zero: Don’t Believe the Hype, Inbox Zero “is simply to accept that finding the time to check for new mail (or new anything, for that matter) should also mean finding the time to make a simple, one-time decision about what each new item means to you. That’s it. Then you get back to your life. Done. Boom.” He continued, “the real zero in Inbox Zero means having no residual anxiety or distraction about either the unknown unknowns or the known knowns or anything in-between.”
Mann offers helpful suggestions to achieve Inbox Zero in his article, Inbox Zero: Processing to zero at his website 43 Folders.
How Not Having an Empty Inbox Saved Me
I don’t have an empty inbox. I tried, I really did, but I gave up when my inbox surpassed the 10,000 message mark many years ago. Now my personal email inbox is filled with over 40,000 messages.
But having a very full inbox recently saved me so I became glad I hadn’t been purging its contents. Last week my laptop computer, a/k/a The Beast, died an ugly death. No worries, I got an AppleCare warranty after I purchased my 17″ MacBook Pro in August 2012. So I brought The Beast into the Genius Bar at the Apple Store for repair where I was told that it needed a new graphics card. I was also informed that they had no record of AppleCare being purchased for my computer.
Oops. Although I had purchased AppleCare for The Beast, it turns out I hadn’t registered my computer when I purchased AppleCare. I had previously bought AppleCare for many products I had purchased from Apple, including an iPod Touch and my previous iPhones, but because I purchased my MacBook Pro from Amazon instead of Apple I was supposed to register AppleCare for my computer. I guess I was too busy playing with my new toy to pay attention to such important details.
The Genius kindly informed me that if I could provide proof of purchase for AppleCare that I could call and get The Beast registered. Apple sends a box with AppleCare information when you purchase the protection and the Genius advised me to try to find that box.
I tried to find the Apple Care box. No luck.
Hello Inbox!
I tried searching my email inbox for “AppleCare” in 2012. No luck. Uh oh.
I then searched for emails from @apple.com from August 2012. I found an email with the shipping information for Apple Protection Plan for MacBook Pro (apparently the coverage wasn’t called AppleCare back then). The shipping information included the order number for my purchase.
I called the phone number for AppleCare given to me by the Genius and sure enough, an AppleCare representative was able to locate my order using the order number from the email and she registered AppleCare to my laptop.
Not having deleted that email saved me over $300.
I clearly could do better though, in clearing out my inbox. Not every saved email will save me $300 (though it would be great if that were true!). Many, if not most, emails in my inbox could be deleted without worry.
Perhaps a good resolution for 2015 would be to get better control of my inbox…
Your Thoughts
Are you a fan or foe of having an empty inbox? Has finding an old email ever saved you money and/or aggravation? Do you spend a lot of time trying to manage your email inbox? Have you tried Inbox Zero? Let us know your thoughts in the Comments section below. If you’re brave enough, share with us the number of emails currently in your inbox!
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* Dangerous Inbox image (edited) courtesy of Recrea HQ via Flickr and Creative Commons
Hey Carolyn!
I have recently arrived at the place where I’ve been able to keep my Inbox clean. I love the feeling of it! It’s the same feeling I have when I look around a clutter-freed room 🙂
However, I have folders where I store important stuff such as “Thing Purchased”. So I think I’m good.
🙂
Lori
Hi Lori, Yes, you’re very good! I bet a lot of people envy your inbox organizational skills. Sounds like you keep the important emails in folders where you can locate them easily and delete the rest.
Well done!
Hi Carolyn,
That was interesting 🙂
Like you, I don’t think I could do with zero inbox and not have any emails in my inbox! But yes, I do have different folders, so everything is stacked in well in those, which saves me a lot of time.
However, I do keep trashing the mail I don’t need, or those that I read and find they are not important. I’ve seen many people don’t do this, as they read the mail and let it lie in their inbox, which perhaps could be piling their mailbox with too much resource and filling it up sooner than usual.
Just as you mentioned about the incidence about the Beast, when I purchased a new Laptop, I also looked up my inbox for the receipt of my old Laptop and was glad to have found it. Had I deleted it all and kept it real neat and empty, I wouldn’t have found it and lost the amount too. This happened with our washing machine too, when we were looking for the call center details online, through one of their bills. So, keeping your email inbox empty to a certain limit is alright, not totally empty!
Thanks for sharing. Have a nice week ahead 🙂
Hi Harleena, Yes, using email as a virtual filing system works well for some of us. Locating a paper receipt years later could be very challenging but finding one in your email is a matter of searching.
Good point, for those who have very limited space for email messages, they could fill up their inboxes quickly if they kept every single email without deleting any.
You sound as if you’re very similar to me, deleting some obviously unimportant emails, organizing others in folders, but not getting to many that are still in the inbox!
Hi Carolyn,
I’m a ‘wish my inbox was empty’ person. I have a new email client and one inbox for each account. I tend to leave emails to remind me of things. I have one to tell me I can deal on the stock market at a cheap rate tomorrow, so that stays! People who like my blog emails stay until I take a look at their blog and lots of other reminders too. A lot of email is research for future posts so they stay too!
The weather keeps changing here, sunshine in the morning can change to snow in the afternoon! My photo shoot is partly outside and partly inside, if there is snow that would make it interesting! I’m going to the launch of Creative Black Country – they like my editing of photos!
Hi Mike, Yes, many people wish they had an empty email inbox but can’t or don’t spend the time to clear it out. Perhaps with the tricks given by Merlin Mann, people can achieve Zero Inbox easily!
Yes, the weather is very changeable here too. Ice storm over the weekend and snow expected tomorrow!
Hey!
Great article and thanks for sharing. I love inbox zero. Trust me, it is not easy but definitely felt rewarding. I receive over 200 emails a day and with inbox zero, I felt it is a job well done!
Try it; you won’t regret it!
Hi Reginald, Wow, it’s great to hear from a fan of Zero Inbox! You’ve used the system successfully and recommend it to others. That’s fantastic. I’m sure you will inspire many other Wonder of Tech readers to give Zero Inbox a try.
Thanks so much for stopping by and sharing your experience with Zero Inbox, Reginald!
Great post Carolyn! It’s very helpful and useful idea about this empty email inbox. Thanks for sharing it.
Hi Alexis, I’m so glad you enjoyed this article about having an empty email inbox. I hope that you are able to achieve that goal, if it is your goal!
Hi Carolyn,
Having an empty inbox is somewhat I don’t think is a good idea. As per your experience of saving $300 just because of that single mail, I guess its not for me. But its a good concept for those you receive useless mails everyday and keep on deleting them.
I have created filters on my mail ID to make sure mails go straight to the categorized folders and It will be easy to locate every mail I have.
And regarding Inbox me, I haven’t really tried it as my email count till date is 8500 and I don’t feel to delete things.
Hi Aditya, Yes, when you don’t actively spend time deleting emails every day, that inbox number can explode. Staying on top of the situation can be very challenging: you may be deleting an email that you really will need later!
Everyone needs to do what’s best for them. I’m glad you found a solution that works well for you, Aditya!
Hi Carolyn. I am the lazy guy who never deletes an email even if its useless or spam but i think inbox should be clean, no spammy mails. I will start following this too 🙂
Hi Shaheryar, Hey, you never know when a saved email will come in handy. It happened to me! But spammy ones will never be handy so I don’t delete those. I hope you get a chance to clean out your inbox, Shaheryar!
I wish I can have an empty inbox, daily when I wake up and turns on my Laptop, I’ve lots of emails and it’s difficult for me to find the important emails among those crappy unread mails.
The worst thing is that even giant companies don’t respect privacy of users and when I create an account on a website most of them share my email to others, a few weeks back I purchased a product from a well-known company(I don’t want to share its name here) and from the very next day of purchase my inbox started getting many spam mails that were relevant to that purchased product.
I think there should be legislation for email spam and if I’ve no interest in their products or services, then why they are wasting mine and their time?
Anyways, I’m going to search any good tool to fight with this email spam.
Hello Hammad, Yes, it’s amazing how our email addresses are shared widely. It’s pretty difficult to avoid email being shared, even if you try hard. You can unsubscribe but I’ve had companies flagrantly disregard my unsubscribe requests.
You’re right, an empty email inbox would be much easier to achieve if getting email messages from a company were opt-in instead of opt out!
Thx for this post, my inbox is always full and it’s always a problem to remove thousends of spam emails. For me the best is to be really carefull with who you share your email.
Success 🙂
Hi Jeremy, Good point, if you give your email out sparingly you’ll have fewer messages to deal with. But still, messages can pile up if you don’t keep on top of them.
Good luck clearing out your inbox, Jeremy!