Email inboxes can feel a little more like disaster zones at times. How many of us, for instance, actively avoid clicking on our mail app because of that hideous red popup telling us we have over 1,000 unread messages?
Even in the age of texting and social media, 4.37 billion people still use emails worldwide, but only a fraction of those people have hygienic inboxes that they stay on top of.
Thankfully, you can be a part of that fraction. All you need is a little know-how. Below are three of our best digital hygiene ideas to stay on top of your emails and make sure your inboxes are clean, neat spaces, rather than overwhelming clutter zones.
First Off, Utilise Your Settings
Let’s start by talking about how to block unwanted emails on iPhone, which is one of the big reasons why your ‘unread messages’ count feels so high. According to a recent study, 83% of all email users receive spam messages, with close to 30% receiving them daily. If you own an iPhone, however, there’s an easy way to deal with this.
All you have to do is open your iPhone settings and find the ‘Mail’ option. Then, find and press the ‘Blocked’ setting and enter the contact you want to block. Once this is done, the contacts that have been sending you spam messages on the regular will disappear from your life – and make your email inbox just a little more bearable.
Keep Your Digital Footprint Clean
You might be wondering just how all of the above contacts are able to send you spam messages in the first place. If you don’t tend to sign up to newsletters, one of the key reasons might be because data brokers have tracked your digital footprint.
For those unaware, data brokers are companies that collect and sell personal information about individuals on the web, often without their knowledge. Once they have your data, they sell it to a number of different entities, including advertisers, businesses, or spammers, making it easy for unwanted emails to flood your inbox. The best way to deal with this is to use online tools to opt out of these data brokers, keeping your digital footprint clean and your inbox even cleaner.
Follow the Inbox Zero Approach
One last way to ensure you don’t need a dual screen to make sense of your email inbox is to adopt the inbox zero approach, which means setting a daily or weekly goal to clear your inbox by archiving, deleting, or categorising your emails. Use folders or labels for specific categories – such as ‘Work’, ‘Personal’, ‘Newsletters’ – and tackle all of your unread emails so they don’t build up.
Let’s say you do this once a week for ten minutes, your inbox will remain sparkly clean, without ever feeling like a daunting space where you’d rather not tread. This doesn’t mean you won’t still get spam emails, of course – the best way to deal with those remains the two options above – but with the right commitment, you’ll be able to fight back and take control of your inbox, keeping it as clean and pristine as possible.