7 Steps to Keep Your Inbox Clean

Create subfolders for important email data. The creation of subfolders can be very useful when managing email. Information from critical vendors or clients can quickly be identified and managed.

Delete any unnecessary emails. Then be sure to delete the emails from your, “deleted items” folder so that they do not take up additional space. This folder should be purged once per month. You should not keep important email messages in this location as it’s meant for trash and this practice will increase the likihood of accidental data loss. This will help free lots of space and will clean up your email significantly.

Watch for duplicate email data – Typically, emails may travel back and forth between users in a company. If these emails have large attachment, this will unnecessarily increase the size of your mailbox. For example, you may have a copy saved in your sent items and then you may have several replies to that very same email.

Attachments should be downloaded and saved somewhere on your computer. Emails with large attachments can be compounded by replies and duplicate emails. Once you have the document saved the email is safe to be deleted.

If you receive an email and it serves no purpose aside from cluttering up your inbox – it should be right clicked and the email sender or their domain should be marked as junk. This will also send future messages from this sender or their domain into your junk email folder.

Delete the junk mail regularly. The junk mail folder should be purged along with your deleted items folder at least once per month.

Setup archiving – all users should setup online archiving so that all email that is older than a certain date is removed from the primary email mailbox and moved to an archive. This archive is searchable and could be used to search for older data while allowing your inbox to remain clean.