How to Clean and Organize an Inbox

With the increase in spam and other unsolicited email, our email inboxes are becoming more difficult to manage. Follow these steps to keep your inbox clean and organized.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. Open your email program.

2. Go to your "Inbox." This is the top level of your message folder structure. You may have only messages in your Inbox, and no folders, depending on how much organizing you have done.

3. Read the messages in your Inbox. Note any commonalities, such as senders, subjects and email groups. Also, imagine any other patterns of emails that you might receive in the future.

4. Create subfolders for classes of email. In most email programs, you can create multiple levels of folders. For example, you could create a subfolder called "Friends and Family," and then two subfolders under that called "Friends" and "Family," and then subfolders under each of those for specific people. Do the same for work, home, hobbies and any other significant categories.

5. Move email to the subfolders. After deleting spam and other unwanted messages, empty the trashcan.

6. If your email program has the capability, establish rules to run automatically on your Inbox. Rules can usually be configured to move email to folders, delete certain types of email and perform other functions based on the sender, recipient, subject keywords and other criteria. Follow the instructions in your email program to create rules that support your email use.

7. Install spam filtering software. Now that you've organized your Inbox, you likely have an even better idea of what kind of spam messages you receive. Install and configure spam software accordingly to protect your Inbox in the future.