You have how many unread emails?

My name is Aisha and I had 5000+ unread emails in my Gmail inbox. About a year ago I started keeping track of the number of unread emails in my inbox. It was a cry for help. I was hoping someone would take pity on me and offer to clean it up. Yeah no takers.

I had a feeling I was missing important email and I was starting to look like a flake to some people. I'm on three nonprofit boards and I was not doing my duties when I couldn't find things in my email. I read a  lot of productivity blogs and they often feature many email solutions. This week I read a lot about email so I figured it was time to take control of my email.

First I used theswizzle.com to help me get off a bunch of mailing list and delete the messages associated with those list. Great, but I seemed to still have a lot of email lingering. I also now had The Swizzle sending me a daily email. That seems like the opposite of what I wanted.

Then I signed up for  Mailstrom.co after I saw them on Lifehacker. It sounded great but then I was in the queue for over a week. During that week I didn't know if it just wasn't working, was slow, or just sucked. So I gave up. About a week later I got an email saying that my inbox was ready. What? I already broke up with you before we started. I tried to log in and got a message saying it was broken. Yeah that's not cool either. We were over before we got started.

While I was waiting for Mailstrom to get its act together I found Sanebox. It basically goes through your inbox and auto sorts things into to stuff that needs to stay in your inbox, archived, or you can read later. Just had to press the button and say poof! It's gotta free trial then after that it's like $2/month. I also like the feature that it strips attachments in future emails automatically and saves them into Dropbox. Losing attachments was a real reason I couldn't get a hold of my inbox. I'm not afraid anymore. This may mean I need DropBox Pro at some point.

But I still had a lot of old email that was sitting there. After Andre told me that it was a Baltimore startup, I went back to Mailstrom.co . I guess it started working because Sanebox had already helped me get the box down. It has a multiple sort functions. So I could see that had I 1500 emails from just three people, none of which I probably needed to keep. Poof!  Deleted or Archived.

So within the last week I have deleted about 25K worth of email.

Now I need to do this for my two other email accounts. Le sigh.