Society of Certified Senior Advisors: Seniors With Too Many Emails: Help Has Arrived!

Are you embarrassed about the number of unread and old emails in your Gmail inbox? Read on to discover ways to organize, delete, and unsubscribe from emails to take back control.

Email can be a quick, effective way to transfer files, keep in touch with the people we love, and share information. But the truth is that many of you have inboxes stuffed with thousands of unread and old messages that you don’t need to keep. It winds up costing you every month for unneeded data storage. And you may not even want to open your inbox because it’s stuffed with junk mail.

How to Organize in Gmail

Most people use Gmail accounts for their email, so we’ll concentrate on it.

Gmail uses labels instead of folders. You can put more than one label on an email, so they’re super flexible. You can even add color to labels to make it easier for old eyes to distinguish them quickly. Label and group every email you are keeping, and it will be a snap to find them again.

Gmail Add-ons and Extensions

The Inbox Pause add-on lets you put a hold on new emails until you want to receive them. If you feel overwhelmed by constant emails coming in, just turn it on.

The Chrome extension Checker Plus for Gmail sends notifications of new emails instantly to your browser. That way, you can read and delete email without having to open it somewhere else, and you can use the text-to-speech engine to listen to emails instead of using them.

Auto Text Expander allows you to use 4G artificial intelligence to avoid repetitive tasks. It will generate emails and chats that you can use again and again.

Apps for Email

There are many apps to help you organize your email. Most are free with an enhanced version you must pony up for.

Spark keeps your inbox clean.
Shift organizes and streamlines all your apps.
Unroll.me unenrolls you from spam email.
FollowUpThen offers help dealing with your inbox.
IFTTT A play on “if this, then that” it will automate actions for your emails.

Use more than one email address, then use the feature to group them all together, called Multiple Inboxes. Multiple inboxes will allow you to look at all of your inboxes in one place.

Use the archive feature to hide emails you don’t need. You can still find them again by clicking on the All Mail label in the menu on the left.

Make unread emails easier to find by always having them go to the top by changing a single setting. In the Inbox tab, change it from Default to Unread First.

If you’d like to keep your brain sharp by learning something new, take a stab at memorizing all of Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts. There are 11 shortcuts to allow you to quickly do things like archive, report as spam, or put type in bold.

Use dots in your Gmail addresses. Hot tip: Gmail doesn’t distinguish between

seniorspirit@gmail.com
senior.spirit@gmail.com
s.e.n.i.o.r.s.p.i.r.i.t.@gmail.com

So you can give different addresses to different people and companies instead of creating different inboxes. Google will still be aware of the difference, so you can create filters by assigning them different-colored labels and Google will sort them automatically.

You can create email aliases by using a “+” sign after your Gmail username and then a descriptive word or two. For example:

seniorspirit+ads@gmail.com
seniorspirit+articles@gmail.com
seniorspirit+futuretopics@gmail.com

This way it becomes easy to filter emails from different senders. A bonus is that you can tell who has leaked your email if you suddenly get hit with spam. Just create a unique address each time you sign up for email ads online.

You can customize your inbox by view and type. For example, you can make all of your starred emails show up first or let Google algorithms decide which email you want to see first. Change to compact view to see more emails on your screen at the same time. As a final step, you’ll want to click Settings, Inbox type, and then Customize. Google displays a tab for Primary (person-to-person conversations and those that don’t show up in another tab), a Social tab for conversations from your social networks, and a Promotions tab for advertising.

Put hashtags inside the body of your email to further make it easy to retrieve and organize emails at a higher level. You can add them anywhere within the body, but it’s a lot less distracting if you insert them at the end of your communication. For instance, you could insert #gastrodelights, #favoriterecipe, #eggs.

For explanations on how to do any of the above gmail handling tips and tricks, click the link.