Learning How to E-Mail Pt. 1 - Primary Mailbox

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2023-06-03 14:00:09

Note: This post is the first part of a planned multi-part series on learning how to manage my e-mail. Check back soon for part 2!

I had a school provided e-mail since I was in 4th grade, and have had my own personal e-mail, the one I still used up until recently, for over a decade. Because e-mail, and other aspects of digital life, were something pushed at us from childhood rather than being a conscious choice to set up and use as an adult, it seems like I, and all of my peers, just kind of use e-mail, creating accounts, getting signed up for newsletters, racking up unread e-mails in the thousands, without any sense of order and organization. It becomes this chore and burden, wading through all sorts of automated annoyances just to dig out that one important e-mail from an employer or classmate.

For the longest time, my solution to this was simply to ignore it. To not use e-mail on my phone, or to just ignore the unread count on my mail app when I eventually needed to use it on my phone. I then switched to a series of e-mail apps that employ their own filtering to make a “focused inbox”. But ultimately, these are just bandaid solutions, trying to deliver a “quick fix”. When I found myself missing important college application e-mails because one of these mail apps was filtering them out erroneously, I decided that enough was enough and that I would fix my e-mail situation.

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