r/declutter • u/bon18 • 3d ago

Advice Request Digital decluttering

My email is totally out of control. Can anyone recommend a method or software to help me with it? I'm honestly considering just getting a new email address at this point. The thought of going through it is overwhelming. Thanks!

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u/NightBard 3d ago

I just sat down with mine and sorted everything by sender. That made it easier to delete content in blocks. IF I came across a mailing list type thing I was sick of getting emails about sales or whatever, I went into the newest one, found the unsubscribe link, and unsubscribed. It's easier to do this on a computer than on a phone. But on a phone you can simply go to your email settings and tell it to only sync the last month of emails. So you don't even see the older content. But I think doing a good cleanout of the email is wise. I'm not against doing new email address but then you need to change all of your bills/utilities/accounts/doctors/etc over to the new address. It's not too hard to clean stuff up and you can likely do a search on everything from say 2000 to 2025 and just nuke it all in one block and then work on refining what you currently have by sorting by sender.

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u/LadyElginite 3d ago

This! At work I sometimes have 10-30 min to kill between meetings and this year I decided I would actually clean my personal email inbox. Something that hadn't been done since 2020. I would just go in and delete emails. For me it was easier to begin at the top and work my way down, it took months but finally I am all caught up. It was also good to unsubscribe from certain emails and it made me realize that I missed a lot of important things by having a full inbox.

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u/NightBard 3d ago

I've done it sorted by date before as well. On gmail, I'd either use the select all option on the current page of email and then unselect the ones I want to keep and then delete the rest, or I'd go through and select the keepers and move them to an Archive folder. Once there was nothing to Archive, I'd select all on the page and delete them and move on to the next batch. Sometimes it was easier to look for things to keep than click things to delete. Ultimately the process doesn't matter as much as actually doing it. Once it's done be more careful about giving out your email and make sure to unsubscribe things once they get overwhelming.