For the most part, I keep all of my email inboxes empty, though occasionally there will be a few messages I’ll leave if they require action (then delete/file once taken care of).
There’s a guy I work with who must have easily a few hundred emails in his in box (some not even read). That would drive me nuts.
So, what is the state of your in box?
My emails are dealt with when I read them or kept as unread. There are rarely unread emails.
However, I don’t do my filing very often (i.e. move stuff to the folders divided by subject area or customer) so it usually has between 500 and 1000 emails in it.
(Curse you, I will now go off and sort.)
I have two sets of email. The incoming stuff goes into Web Mail (a feature of my ISP’s offerings) which has an effective spam blocker. I use it as temporary storage of things I expect to have back-and-forth activity for a short time. It rarely accumulates more than about 30 messages before I move it to a more permanent storage. Outlook Express.
In OE I have individual folders for all sorts of stuff, mostly regular friends and businesses. I have stuff going back years in almost all those folders.
Unless email is of the friend, business or website nature that I want to keep, I delete junk mail immediately. If I keep it, it’s usually indefinitely.
I tried to indicate this in my poll vote, but I’m not sure how it fits. The “Inbox” I related to is the Web Mail inbox, not the OE one. It stays cleared out on a weekly basis, rarely more than two weeks and often as little as two days.
It took me by surprise to hear google (or whatever company) announce that you can now archive emails as though that were my lifelong ambition. Seems entirely a step backwards to me; in a universe in which there were some kind of technological necessity to archive emails it would be a marvellous feature never to have to do that. Now the opposite is touted.
All emails are read immediately upon receipt. Junk is immediately deleted. Other than that it’s not organized in any particular manner. If I need to find something, that’s what the “Search” box is for.
I don’t delete anything. Once my work Outlook goes over its limit, I move them to a pst file on my desktop.
I have Gmail messages going back 7 or 8 years and still have only used a small percentage of my allotted space.
I delete about 50 emails per day, but still have 18,000 in my in box. Need to clean it up more.
I save almost everything. There is some info I have no idea if I will ever want it. In my file system I have i10, i09, i08,… I currently have almost everything since 1 May in my inbox. Maybe time to move some stuff to i11. I do mark those emails with things such as directories to make finding them easier.
When Gmail was introduced it wasn’t really a feature. They wanted people to just leave their messages in their inbox, and sorting would be done through the search bar.
Turns out people want the option to archive. So Google eventually gave it to them.
Personally I leave my inbox pretty full. I try to read each email as it comes in, and only Archive/Spam the emails I actively don’t want hanging around, but otherwise they just sit there.
Work email is kept pristine. I don’t want to have a messy inbox. I also archive most of my emails there to CMA.
Personal email I’ve given up on. It all goes to Gmail, where I can search if needed.
Very… Clean…** N O T **!
They overwhelm me. I hate thinking about cleaning them out (do they intentionally make it difficult?) but when I actually do it, it is very satisfying… like a lot of things I avoid doing in life.
Spotless.
I file a lot and I keep a lot in my inbox.
I don’t file anything. I only delete stuff I definitely never want to see again. My inbox contains thousands of messages. Once they fall off the first page, that’s the same as them being filed, as far as I care.
I don’t have the time or inclination to potter about putting things here and there.
Agree with Mangetout – never file anything. Everything I hate is already deleted or spam-boxed. If I were teaching a class, I’d create some folders, but as it is, everything I care about is from someone whom I know personally, even if I deal with them professionally (i.e., they pay me). Don’t care, so much.
I use Outlook Express with five email accounts pouring into it. Anything that is spam that did not get filtered is deleted when I see it. The rest stays until the screen is overflowing the desktop. Then, anything legal also gets saved and the rest trashed.
All the mail is deleted from the server when downloaded so in that sense, mail is deleted immediately actually before read from the server. We all know people who never delete from the server until someone calls or texts them that their box is full.
I used to keep it below 100, I just chethen I revised that to 200, then,… I just checked and there were 673, the last two unread. I was getting near 800 a few weeks ago and did a major cleanup down to 600, but it creeps up.
Same here. Don’t see the point in filing them in any way when I could just run a quick search on them. I have a couple “Smart” email boxes that do direct emails from certain senders into their own mailboxes, but otherwise, I don’t bother.
I currently have 23K messages in my Inbox, and 13K in my Junk folder.
I forgot about ‘smart’ folders. Yes. I’ve got a couple of those for ebay-related messages etc. A rule set files those for me
I will often have emails that appear to be about a certain customer that are not. Filing them by customer means that later I remember that this customer was having a particular problem.
I also never delete work emails. I have been known to pull out an eight year old email and reuse the contents (since we still have customers on releases of our software that are that old and will have the same problems that others had).
It’s all archived and backed up. I keep three months worth in my active folders.