Everyone Has Email. Nobody Uses It Right

How to Manage Your Email

Unsubscribe from Everything You Don't Read

Be ruthless. If you haven't opened an email from a company in three months, you don't need their emails. Every legitimate marketing email has an unsubscribe link at the bottom. Use it.

Yes, it takes time. Yes, you'll have to do it for dozens (maybe hundreds) of subscriptions. But it's worth it: think of it as spring cleaning for your digital life.

Set Up Filters

Filters are automated rules that organize your email before you even see it. This is where email gets powerful.

Basic filtering:

• Automatically label/tag emails from specific people or domains
• Skip the inbox for newsletters you want to keep but don't need to read immediately
• Star emails from your family members or important contacts
• Automatically archive receipts and confirmations after applying a label

Most email clients let you create filters. In Gmail, you click the three dots on any email and select "Filter messages like this." In Apple Mail, you go to Mail → Settings → Rules. In Outlook, it's under Settings → Mail → Rules.

Advanced filtering (for the brave):

• Use search operators to create complex filters (like from:newsletter@* OR from:promo@*)
• Set up auto-responders for specific senders when you're unavailable
• Create filters that forward certain emails to other addresses

Color Coding (Apple Mail)

If you use Apple Mail, you can add color tags to emails, which makes scanning your inbox significantly easier. Different colors can represent different categories, urgency levels, or projects.

To set this up in Apple Mail:

• Go to Mail → Settings → Rules
• Create a new rule
• Set conditions (like "From contains" or "Subject contains")
• Under "Perform the following actions," select "Set Color" and choose your color
• Save it

I use red for urgent stuff, blue for personal correspondence, green for confirmations, and yellow for things I need to read but aren't time-sensitive. Your system can be whatever makes sense to you. The point is visual organization that helps your brain process information faster.

Use Search Like a Pro

Email search is incredibly powerful if you know how to use it. Here are some tricks:

Gmail search operators:

• from:[email protected] – emails from a specific person
• to:me – emails sent directly to you
• subject:invoice – emails with "invoice" in the subject
• has:attachment – emails with attachments
• filename:pdf – emails with PDF attachments
• after:2023/01/01 – emails from a specific date onward
• is:unread – unread emails (obviously)
• is:starred – starred emails

You can combine these: from:[email protected] has:attachment after:2024/01/01

Apple Mail search:

• Use the search field at the top and select specific criteria (From, To, Subject)
• Use quotation marks for exact phrases: "quarterly report"
• Search within a specific mailbox by selecting it first

The better you get at search, the less you need to organize things manually. Search is your friend. Search is life.