How to Clean Out Your Email ?

"I can't possibly get rid of anything in my inbox! I need all 12,000 items in there." Does this sound familiar? Cleaning out your inbox is a good way to reduce clutter in your life. In some cases, depending on your company's email setup, it may become a necessity at times. The cost of server storage has gone down but there can still be risks of corruption if your mailbox gets too bloated.

Step1
There are several methods for cleaning out your inbox. Most email programs will let you sort your email in different ways. Often there is a link or word, like "sent", "date", or "size" at the top of your email you can click on to sort the column.

Step2

In my opinion, the best place to start is with the size. One deleted email with a 5MB attachment will clear more space on the email server than 1000 emails with text like "ok thanks" and no attachments. If you do not see an option for sorting by "size" then click on any "view" toolbar options within your email program to see if you can add that category. For size, anything marked with just a "b" after it is the smallest, then items with "kb" are bigger, and items with "MB" are the largest.

Step3

Determine which large items you can afford to delete. These days, a lot of people are concerned with "C-Y-A" or "C-Y-B". Often you can save that 5MB attachment to the company file server and then delete the corresponding email. An individual file on the file server can be restored more easily by your I.T. department if the file were to get corrupted. If they had to restore your entire mailbox it would e a more involved task.

Step4

Next, sort your email by sender. This will group all the emails together by the senders' names. This can be good because you may come across blocks of email sent by someone who is no longer with the company and you may not need to keep their emails for "C-Y-A" purposes. Also, look out for emails from departments like HR, I.T., and Facilities. You'd be surprised how many emails you will find from over a year ago saying things like "The email server will be down this weekend", "Holiday list, 2005", and "toilets on the 3rd floor are now working again." Just TRY to convince someone of why you still need these in your inbox.

Step5

Look for continuous strings of emails to delete. A lot of emails are continuous replies as two people three cubicles away from each other have a conversation via email. Many email systems keep a copy of the previous email text at the bottom of the reply. You can check to be sure your email system does this but a lot of them do. If you need to keep an email string for "C-Y-A" then you could just keep the last one, which includes all the text from the earlier part of the conversation, and delete the others.

Step6

Finally, if you have looked through all your emails and truthfully determined you can't delete any more then ask your I.T. department, or check your email software's help feature, for instructions on how to export your email to something like a PST file. This will export a copy of your emails to a file you can then save to the file server.