Section 10.2. Jump Starting the Process

10.2. Jump Starting the Process

The difficult part about this system can be getting started. If you have 2,000 email messages in your inbox, this system must sound like some kind of unrealistic fantasy.

My recommendation? Forget the really old stuff and move forward.

Some mail clients have special archive functions. However, it is just as easy to create a folder called "DeadItems-2005-11-19" (or whatever the date is) and move all items older than that date into that folder.

Now you have a clean inbox, and if someone does need you to pull something out of your old archive, it's all right there.

And if you don't touch that folder for a full year, burn it onto a CD-ROM, delete it, whatever, just get it out of your mailbox. If you haven't touched it for a year, there is little chance you'll touch it ever. Your email client will run faster now that it doesn't have to manage such a huge index.

I'm still waiting for someone to write a program that will seek out all email older than a year and burn them onto a CD-ROM, along with a little Java program that would let me search and browse the messages, and even restore selected items to my mail reader. Alas, such a beast doesn't exist. I even have a cool name for the technique: "Pickled Email" (like the food-preserving process). If you invent such a tool, you are free to use that nameno charge.

Does it sound impossible to just let go of 2,000 email messages?

Let me ask you this: when are those 2,000 email messages actually going to get processed?

Next month?

How long have you been saying "next month"?

Before I developed the previously described technique, I tried two other methods unsuccessfully:

• Random 100 a day. I used to think that if every day I could process and delete 100 old messages, I could clean out my inbox in a month. However, when I tried to do that, my inbox just got bigger! I couldn't keep it up for a full month. Plus, processing 100 messages can take more than an hour. That's 20 to 30 hoursmore than half a weekto complete this project. I could do other things with that time.

• By person. Another technique that I tried was to process my inbox by person. I'd deal with all the messages from a particular person. They'd get a flood of mail: "Do you still need this?" "What about this?" "Hey, I finally read this, it was hilarious. Thanks!" Then I was done with that person forever...or until the next time I got behind in reading email.

Though the by-person technique also failed for me, it did have a benefit over processing 100 messages a day: it let me set priorities. I could pick the more important people in my life rather than a smattering of messages from random people.

However, realistically, once you have more than 1,000 or so messages in your inbox, I think you have to accept that those messages are never going to really get processed.

Sorry, they just aren't.

I know it's difficult to accept because it was difficult for me, too. However, one day I looked at the oldest messages in that big pile and realized that some of them were more than five years oldfrom another era.

If you reply to an email that is that old, people often think you are crazy, or they question if your reply was caught in a stuck queue, or they make a joke about time travel.

What's the worst that could happen? If the email was truly urgent, you would have already received another request, or you would have gotten in trouble. Huge inboxes are full of messages that are, essentially, dead.

So, if they are never going to get processed, why not move them to an archive and forget about them? Your mail client will work faster without all those messages eating up memory and other resources. It will start up faster, too.