Email suffocation

A New Year always invites us to set goals and get rid of some bad habits like Quit smoking, Lose weight, Move more, etc. I do not have to do that. I quit smoking 13 years ago, I enjoyed a 5 years weight loss journey many years ago that brought me to the right BMI index. My fitness app tells me that my body age is 41 while in reality, it is my home for already 74 years.

OK, maybe reduce my alcohol consumption. Also not a spectacular aim. A few days a week 1 bottle of beer or glass of wine isn't that much. Reducing that would mean stop at all.

MY EMAIL INBOX

However, there is something bothering me without finding a solution so far. My Inbox. The inflow of emails per day is a constant raising graph. It varies from 100 - 150 a day. Emails of suppliers I bought from in the past, emails that are part of my business processes, emails about subjects that I once expressed interest for,

Years ago I split the inflow in a private wild river flowing into my Gmail account and a tsunami of business-related emails into my Outlook account. And until today they both cost me too much time. Partly that is me.

I am a collector, I find it hard to throw things away. I rather store and keep them for years because "you never know if it could help you sometime in the future". For my business activities, I have several email addresses but they are all forwarded to my main email address.

As a result my IMAP box at my domain almost exceeds the 4GB max quota. So now I am forced to clean up. I already got rid of the years 2013-2016. But I need to delete at least 1 more year to be safe for the next 6 months. The most important emails are stored on my computer in neatly organized folders which is a great help to retrieve older emails.

Now my private Gmail account. I am not fond of Gmail, because Google decides for me what is primary or of lesser importance. I never understood the way Gmail works. Sometimes my emails stay sitting in my Outbox without I am noticing that. I really can't read an email thread on a certain topic, because they are folding in and out. So I spend as short a time as possible on Gmail, but then sometimes I miss important private emails like health insurance notices and the likes.

MY QUEST FOR A SOLUTION

Many times I feel suffocated by the daily email inflow and my only practical solution is to delete as many emails as I can, unseen. Of course, there is a simple and effective Unsubscribe button in most emails, but then I get no visual warning any more so I can decide "do I spend time on it or not". It is a dilemma.

Being part of Wealthy Affiliate does not really help in that respect. It raised my daily email inflow with 5-10 very positively written emails, depending my activity on the platform. But these I would not like to miss also.

WHO HAS THE ANSWER?

Why am I sharing this personal problem? Well, first of all I think this is not only my personal problem. Many of you might have the same feeling. It is always good to know that you are not alone in your suffering :-).

But I would like to invite you to help us suffocated sufferers with brilliant solutions if you have found one. I am open for any advice and eternally grateful if it brings me the ultimate solution.

A future that does not ask me several hours per day to eat myself through the email inbox and without need to feel missing a lot of the fun stuff.

That is my New Years goal and I wish you the same !

Jack