My Email Hygiene
I try to keep my email inbox as clean as possible. The rules are as follows:
- I never subscribe to newsletters or blogs via email. I always prefer RSS, and if that’s not available, I use Feedbin newsletter support to convert newsletter emails into RSS feeds (consider also Kill the Newsletter! as a free alternative). Email should not be the gateway to news or new information, that’s what I use RSS for.
- Whenever I do get unwanted emails, I unsubscribe immediately. No waiting, no archiving, no deleting and waiting for the next one. Just unsubscribe and forget about it.
- I avoid using my real email address for accounts or public use. Instead, I either:
- Use iCloud’s Hide My Email to forward everything to my inbox without exposing my actual address
- Use aliases (like the reply-to email on this blog)
- Whenever I’m done with an email, I archive it.
These rules leave me with mostly two types of emails:
- Personal communication (replies to posts, work-related emails, calendar invites, etc.)
- Tasks disguised as emails - forms to fill out, logistics to handle, etc. When possible, I turn them into items in my to-do app and archive the email. Otherwise, they stay in the inbox until handled. Since I don’t receive many emails to begin with, this rarely piles up.
This keeps my inbox clean and focused on what’s important to me. That’s it. No need for AI filtering my inbox, no agent crawling the inbox or tagging it. Self-discipline and the above rules do the heavy lifting before things get messy.
(inspired by Digital hygiene: Emails by Herman Martinus)