You vs. Your Inbox (Web): 4 Strategies for Inbox Management

Everyone has their own cool trick to get control of their inbox. Forge magazine started an insightful series called You vs. Your Inbox to highlight some of the best strategies. Currently, there are four articles with different ideas about tackling inbox overload. Read them all, they offer different perspectives on dealing with email.

One article talks about how the secret is sending better emails. If you compose emails that make it clear what the response should be, there will be less confusion and fewer ambiguous messages sent back and forth. Another talks about how you should check email in sessions, and have a purpose assigned to each session.

The third email management system is about triaging your inbox with labels, making it easier to sort and filter the messages. And finally, one strategy talks about how it’s not important to have inbox zero, which has one of the best pieces of advice: “It’s important to remember that email itself isn’t work.”

Instaclean (Android, iOS): Find Senders and Subscriptions You Don’t Open

Instaclean is one of the best free apps to manage your inbox. It lets you delete and block unwanted newsletters. And it shows you senders who are clogging up your inbox when you don’t even read their messages.

Bulk Delete sorts emails by sender, showing you how many of their messages are in your inbox and how many of them you have ever opened. If someone is sending you many emails and you open 0-1% of them, you might want to block that sender and delete all their messages still in your inbox. Emails can be sorted by sender or size.

The app also finds all the subscriptions you are getting emails from, which aren’t being sent to spam. In a few taps, you can block all such emails you no longer want to receive. It doesn’t delete all subscriptions, and you’ll have to do multiple passes. In a way, that’s good because you don’t want to accidentally remove something you like.

Each action (delete or block) rewards you with coins. Once you collect 1000 coins, you can use them for a good cause by asking Instaclean to plant a tree on your behalf. You can also earn coins by referring the app to friends.

Paced Email (Web): Get Frequent Emails as Batches and Summaries

Not every newsletter is unwanted, but it might be coming to you too often. Similarly, even if a colleague is trigger-happy with sending bulk emails on the office chain, you can’t ignore them. Paced Email lets you turn frequent messages into batches, so they land in your inbox when you want.

Register at the website to get your personal email alias, for example, john.doe@daily.paced.email. Then go to the newsletter, chain, or service that is mailing too often, and change your email address to this alias. Paced will then batch all emails from it and send it as a daily digest. If you want an email sooner, login to the website and trigger an immediate digest.

You also can also specify how often you want to receive emails from that service. By default, it’s daily as the email alias indicates, but you can change it to “weekly” or “monthly”. Paced will then send batches according to your preferences.