PURPOSE

Do you go through a yearly ritual of cleaning out your inboxes because you’ve exceeded your allotted mailbox space, or you find rooting through that collection of missives to be so daunting that you’d rather just mass delete everything and start all over, only to have to go through the very same ritual in 365 days?

If so, TechRepublic Premium presents the six best tips for cleaning out your personal and professional inboxes so you don’t have to deal with the yearly purge.

From the guide:

1. USE MORE THAN ONE EMAIL ADDRESS
I’m going to start with a piece of advice that might sound counter-intuitive at first, but hear me out. I have four primary email addresses that I use, one each for:

• Personal email.
• Professional tech.
• Professional writing.
• Email sign-ups.

The first three accounts are pretty self-explanatory. It’s the last account (email sign-ups) that might confuse you. I try not to sign up for too many mailing lists or opt in to email updates. On the rare occasion that I either must do so or am so inclined to sign up for something, I use only one email address for that purpose. By doing so, I know what’s going into that inbox and can mostly ignore it throughout the day or even the year. Only when that inbox gets full do I comb through it to see if there’s actually anything I need to read (which there rarely is).

With this email account system, I pretty much always know where to look for certain communications and already have a pretty clean base to start with.