Long long time ago, briefly after the birth of gmail, I created an email account, and mail was good. Fast forward to now, holy spams. Years and more than a decade of neglect, I’ve managed to amass more than 11,000 emails, and this is post spam filter. I guess over the years, I must’ve signed up for every single notification and newsletter out there. Each them I delete an email, and unsubscribe from a list, another newsletter shows up, and I’d think that I must’ve unsubscribed already, but I’m not too sure anymore. All I knew was that my inbox was looking like this:
I’d stare at that number every day, thinking “Someday, I’ll clean it, but today is not to the day…”
The idea of going through my mail one by one, and then checking to see if the sender was a bulk sender or not, and then unsubscribing from it, just seems like such a time consuming task. Then I start noticing that in the midst of the spam, here and there, there were some important emails I’m starting to miss. That was the spark that lit my fire to put an end to this spam once and for all.
Using my computer programming powers, I created a program to go through my mail, and build a list of senders I receive emails from, and the amount of emails I have from them:
thousands upon thousands of emails later
I’ve built a list of emails and their frequencies, and life was good, but I knew I can do better.
I took it a step further, and built another list based on the domain of the sender.
Utilizing these two newly crafted weapons in my arsenal, I blew away thousands upon thousands of emails, some of which were spam, some of which were transaction emails that no longer have any importance. Once the non-important emails have been unsubscribed from and removed, it was so much easier to deal and organize my old emails. Once that noise was removed, it was so much easier to deal with my new emails. Now, my emails look like this
And life… was good.