Cleaning out my inbox
For some reason, I decided one morning I wanted to clean out and organize the 14,000 emails in my inbox. I’ve always kept the unread emails at 0 but I wanted to come up with an organization system that would allow me to automate the sorting of emails as much as possible. I used this as an opportunity to play around with Claude and see if it could write some filters for me that would do the bulk of the work. Ultimately I still had to sort through thousands of emails myself, deleting the useless stuff and polishing the edges that automation couldn’t reach.
Work Flow
The ideal email hygiene for me is to receive an email that was automatically labeled in accordance with my system so I can read it and choose to archive it or delete it. In order to get to that point I needed to clear out the 14,000 read emails in my inbox. I ended up settling on 10 labels that match the type of emails I want archived and tucked away.
- Appointments
- Finances
- Healthcare
- Notifications
- Orders
- Orders/Shipping
- Organic
- Security
- Subscriptions
- Terms and Services
Claude.ai
Being able to use Claude.ai to create filters to automate labeling made the whole project much more approachable. It seems like it would be straightforward to add addresses and subject line keywords as they come up but it really isn’t. One example is my Orders label and Shipping nested label.
This truncated piece of my Orders filter catches emails about the actual order confirmation emails:
(from:auto-confirm@amazon.com OR from:ebay.com subject:(confirmed OR "your order is confirmed"))
While this piece of the same filter, prevents an email from mentioning my order is on the way, getting labeled Orders instead of Shipping.
-subject:(shipped OR shipment OR tracking OR delivered OR "out for delivery" OR "on the way"
The advantage of something like this is I can automate reading and archiving shipping update emails, obviating the time I spent responding to notifications. All I need to know is that an order went through. If I ever need to check on the shipping status I can just go into my Shipping label and find it.
One more example is from the dozens (hundreds?) of emails I had from back when I used TurboTax. I needed to batch delete these emails but wanted to keep the ones that mentioned my returns were filed.
(from:e.turbotax.intuit.com OR from:em1.turbotax.intuit.com OR from:notifications.intuit.com OR from:notification.intuit.com OR from:TurboTaxOnline) -subject:"Return Accepted" -subject:"E-file Successful"
The above search query is just something I never would have been able to come up with on my own. It saved me an enervating 10 minutes of going through and pressing shift+# 100-times, guaranteeing I didn’t accidently delete the emails I wanted to archive.
When filters became too long I used Claude to create some code that runs in Google’s scripting app. The roughly 500 lines of code run every 5 minutes checking for emails that appear to be from real people and gives them the label Organic. It does this mainly by looking for senders with addresses like noreply@, notifications@, marketing@. It also has Bcc detection to check if it’s part of a mailing list. I had it make a separate function to back-label my Organic label. Running that a few times and having it check for false positives was a good way to refine the script.
In the end it was 3 days of attrition to go through roughly 14,000 emails.
Physical Mail
While on the subject of mail, my email inbox isn’t the only place I’m subjected to a constant stream of junk. When I go to check the mail I’d like to know that what I’m pulling out is probably important. I took a few steps to try and achieve that.
The first thing I did was pay the 8 dollars to DMA Choice. This puts you on a do-not-mail list for things like marketing and credit card offers. It does feel weird to pay someone to remove you from a list they use so companies will stop spamming your mail box but I caved to the extortion.
The second tool I’ve been using is Catalog Choice. It’s a non profit organization that helps you unsubscribe from mailing lists. It’s a frictionless way to get your name off these lists.
For the rest of the junk I either emailed companies myself asking to be taken off their list or wrote refused on the physical letter and put it in the outgoing mail box.
Refused - Return to sender
Refused - Remove from mailing list
Refused - Not at this address
Minimalism
I’m not a hardcore minimalist by any stretch. I do appreciate a certain level of minimalishness though, especially in the informational parts of my life. Reducing the amount of spam information I’m exposed to will help me stay organized mentally.