I did it! I finally got all emails in my main Gmail account that I’ve had since 2014 organized and cleaned out. If you’re curious how I figured out a quick way to do it, I just started searching my emails by email addresses. This would give me lists of similar emails and then I moved those into appropriate label folders. I also deleted a ton of old promotional emails and social emails. I’ve still got some things to get rid of, but at least everything is now tucked away in a folder where I can work on getting rid of things a little at a time in sections. Going forward, I will work on moving any new emails into the folders I set up so that I can keep my inbox empty. Now that I’ve figured out how to do this job quickly, I can work on organizing some of my other Gmail accounts that I’ve also had for years. It really feels great to have this accomplished. I’ve wanted to get it done for a long time. Yay me!

I am feeling sad tonight lol… I just realized that (well I already knew it) Gmail not only has a Primary inbox, but also has a Promotions tab and a Social tab for email. I’ve just added up all of my emails in these tabs, and I currently as of this post have 12,761 emails to sort into their appropriate folders. Well folks this is what happens when you allow your email to go unsorted for for years. I guess I’m gonna be busy for quite awhile if I ever want to get my emails in order.

If you are curious why I haven’t been posting much over the last couple of days, it’s because I have started working on organizing my primary email. It is a email account that I’ve had for years that has essentially gone unorganized and is piled up with hundreds of unread emails. How I have survived and stayed current with events in my life using this particular email account is baffling to me while I’ve been working on this project.

I am finding things that I had long forgotten about. But I have learned my lessons. The first lesson I’ve learned is that I needed to be taking my email more seriously since so much of my life is tied to it. The second lesson I’ve learned is that it really isn’t difficult to manage an email account. I use Gmail, and it allows sorting by labels, and you can move your emails into those labels so that your inbox doesn’t have to stay full all the time.

I guess I just admitted that I suck at email management over the last few years, but I’m working on getting that issue fixed, and I consider myself lucky that Gmail does a great job of not losing any emails, at least as far as I can tell. I’m probably not going to be doing a lot of blogging, other than the daily questions prompts, so that I can at least have one post going up daily on Pad53 which is one of my main goals for this site, until I have my email under control.

As of this post I have 1,400+ emails left to finish. This is down from nearly 4K a day or two ago.