spring cleaning, email edition

May 18, 2022 6:27 AM

Just graduated college and transitioning to using my personal email again. I basically used my edu email for EVERYTHING for the past four years, so now I need to transition everything to the personal email, maybe cancel some subscriptions, etc. Personal email is very cluttered. tips would be very appreciated!

Some other more specific details:
- I’m subscribed to quite a few Substacks and other newsletters; I’ve already started shifting my subscriptions but unsure how to continue to do that.
- I signed up for a lot of services with my edu email - but I’m not sure how to track them all down without going through literally every service I am subscribed to (which may not be a bad idea as I am also trying to do some financial spring cleaning as well).
- Probably most problematic is how messy my personal email is. I wish I could just clean out the whole thing and start fresh (and maybe save a couple emails that are actually still relevant to me now). It’s overrun with spam emails and not organized at all. I’d also like some tips on how to organize it better - for example, is there a way for me to set rules so promotional emails (from brands) automatically go into a separate folder and newsletters go into a separate folder etc?

thanks in advance for all the help!

posted by cruel summer to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)

It is likely you can set up your university email to forward to you personal email (or if you use gmail, I believe you can set this up from the personal account end). If you set up a filter or tag for things sent to the university address, you'll be able to catch any subscriptions that you've forgotten to migrate.

I'm all ears for someone who knows how to keep personal email under control.
posted by hoyland at 6:51 AM on May 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

I have a password manager. I searched for everything in the password manager that was connected to my .edu email address and migrated it over. Unfortunately, there are some services that I signed up for twice without realizing it, so I have two accounts: one with my .edu and one with my normal email. In that case, I had to delete accounts or email the website management people asking for them to merge my accounts.
posted by elzpwetd at 7:03 AM on May 18, 2022

I use Unroll.me for promotional emails and coupons. It sends me one digest email every day with just the subject line of all those promotion emails in a long list. I rarely look at the actual digest email, but if I'm planning to buy something, I go through and search to see if they have any coupons or promos. The product isn't perfect, but it helps a lot with inbox cleanup.
posted by mjcon at 7:05 AM on May 18, 2022

You might want to look into unroll.me to manage your subscriptions. You can keep the ones you want and they’re condensed into a single daily digest.

On preview: seconding
posted by Roger Pittman at 7:07 AM on May 18, 2022

There will be some good tips here:
https://hiverhq.com/blog/email-management

Folders are nice and sometimes helpful, but email search is pretty powerful now and you may think about just having an archive folder where you save everything without getting bogged down into which category it should be filed under. Spam is not worth your time, just delete it all and block the sender if possible.
posted by soelo at 7:08 AM on May 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Search your email for the word "unsubscribe," and you should end up with almost every subscription, distribution list, customer list, etc., that you're on.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 7:18 AM on May 18, 2022 [5 favorites]

It might be worth creating a new personal email account that you only give out to trusted people. Have promotional emails go to old personal email account and selectively forward to new personal email account.
posted by oceano at 7:27 AM on May 18, 2022 [5 favorites]

I did this a few years ago with my personal email (albeit without the college address, which incidentally I do have forwarded; it's just that 20 years after graduation, the only thing still emailing that address is the student newspaper). There are two parts: the initial cleanout and the maintenance. In the initial cleanout, sort your inbox by sender. Then go one sender at a time: Do you want to continue receiving email from this sender? If not, click unsubscribe right then, then delete all the emails in your inbox. Repeat for each sender. If you have spam messages, flag them as spam before deleting. If you do want to continue receiving email from them, though, you'll need to decide whether you want to save them or read-and-delete. If you want to save them (e.g., receipts for shopping), create a folder and move all the messages from that sender there. This will take a while, but you'll eventually get to inbox zero. That's when you move into the maintenance phase. Every time you get a new email, repeat the process. Unsubscribe if necessary, then delete or move the appropriate folder.

I do have some rules set up for marketing emails that I do actually want to receive, but increasingly I find myself signing up for fewer mailing lists and just following the company on social media instead. But the easiest thing to do is to create a folder called "marketing" or something like that. Then when you get an email from a company you want to keep getting emails from, copy the sender's address and make a rule to send all mail from that sender to the marketing folder.

At this point, most of the emails I get in my inbox are newsletters that I delete immediately after reading.
posted by kevinbelt at 7:36 AM on May 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Just to amplify "you can probably set up your .edu email to forward to your personal email." I graduated college in the mid-2000s, and my Amazon account is still technically at my .edu. I could change it, but why bother, when I have more important/interesting things to do and this works?

If you want your personal mail to be cleaner, there's probably no substitute for going through your inbox once and cleaning up. I use the gmail web client, and my approach is to use the top-left "check everything" checkbox, then uncheck only the things I want to save, and send everything else to trash. The implication here is that I get way more junk mail than useful email, yes.

Every year or so I go through my personal email (gmail) and toss everything that I don't want/need to save. Receipts go in a 'receipts' folder. I tend to leave stuff from people I care about in the inbox. I generally just delete junk/ad mail as I get it, but some days I forget, so going back through and cleaning every so often is nice.
posted by Alterscape at 7:44 AM on May 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Consider if it’s worth having more than one personal email account. One that you keep very professional and use for job application and serious personal stuff and one for everything else.
posted by koahiatamadl at 8:39 AM on May 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

I wish I could just clean out the whole thing and start fresh (and maybe save a couple emails that are actually still relevant to me now

Why can't you do precisely this? It is what I would do: save a few essential emails and cull the rest. Going forward, inbox zero is the way.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 9:01 AM on May 18, 2022

I've been moderately impressed by https://clean.email/ as a supporting tool to identify swaths of old email that can be ignored/deleted and surface the remaining valuable history. It's $10/mo for a subscription, and you could probably immediately cancel to use use it for 30 days.

For bulk email-to-email transfers, I have successfully used https://www.cloudhq.net/synch_wizard to transfer between both different accounts (GMail -> GMail, Outlook -> Outlook) and also different cloud systems (Gmail -> Outlook, Gmail -> Dropbox Backup). That's currently $40/mo for running most data migration paths.

Note that it is possible to use CloudHQ to move just selected folders, so you could collect the email you want to keep and just move that subset. CloudHQ also has an export-to-PDF or export-to-mbox-backup formats if you don't need those messages in the new email account search.
posted by QuixoticGambit at 11:19 AM on May 18, 2022

Are you using a desktop or phone email client, or are you using a browser-based web client? Answers may differ.

If you're using anything through Windows, I recommend Mailstore Home which can archive email from many places, and restore it to others.
posted by TimHare at 3:35 PM on May 19, 2022