Organize Your Email With Delimiters
How many unread messages do you have in your email box right now? If you are like many people, that number has several digits. You may find yourself in a situation that might very well only be resolved by creating an entirely new email – and I know that is not an easy task – I’ve done it a few times (and helped others through the process). Whether you decide to keep on keeping on or start fresh I’m going to give you a great method to help organize the clutter.
Most of the more modern email providers, Gmail, Outlook, Office 365 support a feature that goes by many names (plus addressing, tags, disposable addresses, delimeters). It’s the simple art of extending your existing email and adding a tag that will identify the source of where you are receiving emails. The best part is you don’t even have to do anything special to enable it (in most cases)!
Note: If it’s not turned on in your 365 tenant, an admin will need to run this command in Exchange Online Powershell:
Set-OrganizationConfig -AllowPlusAddressInRecipients $true
The downside is – there are some services that for some reason just cannot comprehend the idea that people might actually use this. When you update your favorite sites, make sure you can receive a test email from them before committing fully on a very important site (like a bank). Some mail providers will at least let you create aliases if a site cannot handle tags. And of course while I don’t prefer to use the base email, sometimes I just have no choice.
So now the idea: Let’s say I have an email of Dustin@Gmail.com. If I want to create a special email for Twitter, I would sign up (or change) my email to:
Dustin+Twitter@Gmail.com
Gmail supports plus addressing and Twitter can comprehend plus addressing so there should be no problem in receiving this mail to my inbox.
This one example by itself isn’t very impressive of course, but what if we consistently do this for various sites? What if we subscribe to several newsletter sites that we don’t want cluttering our mailbox but we still want the content of those newsletters?
Dustin+Newsletter@Gmail.com
Or:
Dustin+MagazineSiteName@Gmail.com
And now we create a folder under our Inbox called Newsletters and create a rule (unless you opt for RSS feeds). The way rules are handled vary by your mail provider but essentially the outcome we want is:
IF: TO= Dustin+Newsletters@Gmail.com ; THEN: Move to Folder= Newsletters
Now we have a nice little folder where all these newsletters automatically get placed. We can browse them at our leisure and when we need to view important information at a glance, they aren’t in the way. This can apply to any number of scenarios:
+Bank1 +CreditCard2 +Spam +Auto +Amazon +Bills +Receipts
And the list goes on. Create rules for all of these, flag Bills as important as soon as it comes in, automatically move Spam to your Junk folder. The possibilities are endless! At this point your mailbox is basically cleaning itself. Not only can you create tons of rules, but it makes searching for the content you need so much faster:
Search: "Best Buy Receipts"
Since you know you gave the +Receipts address to use for your emailed invoices, the search will return more focused results.
This methodology is also great at protecting your accounts from vulnerabilities. If Twitter were to become compromised, attackers would have my email and password, BUT that email is not my real email, and that password was generated by my password manager. Most attacks are generally automated and a list of compromised accounts is spammed at a site, so that information is basically useless for trying to gain access to really anything else, much less the more important accounts.
Words Of Wisdom
You may just decide your current mess is too far from redemption. I’ve seen many people finally go through all the trouble of creating a new account, and then set up a universal forward for all their old mail. Don’t do this. This is precisely what will cause your 9999+ emails to appear in your fresh new account. You may be in the moment with your new address and be adamant about unsubscribing and cleaning things up as they come in, but this will wear off and that new car smell will go away.
Update all your important accounts with your new address (with tags if possible), and forget about the rest for now. There is nothing stopping you from checking in on your old account from time to time – possibly creating rules from SPECIFIC senders to forward (with tags) to your new address. You can always go in later and update destination emails to those less important sites as time permits.