In my Question of the Week email this past Sunday, I listed a number of computing-related activities you could do while sheltered away in your home because of the COVID-19 virus. In the next few posts, I’m going to look at each one of the items and give you some “how to” information. Sometimes, my info will be all in written format with pictures, other times, it will be video. As always, if you have questions or comments, please use the comment area below each post.

#1 – Clean out your email!  This is a great time to get rid of unnecessary emails – not just those in your Inbox but even old sent emails that aren’t important enough to keep.

Cleaning out your Inbox is a no-brainer for most people. However, we often find that people don’t empty their Deleted/Trash folder. Some email providers will remove deleted emails after a certain period of time but many don’t. So, I often see hundreds, if not thousands, of deleted emails still sitting (and taking up space) in the Deleted/Trash folder.

Another folder often ignored is the Sent Folder. As an example, this morning, when I check my Sent folder, it contains 3,789 emails. While it is often important to keep a copy of the emails you’ve sent (for good record keeping, etc.), many times there are emails in the folder that can be deleted. It’s not always important to keep a sent email that simply reads “See you tomorrow at 10:00 a.m.” when the meeting took place two months ago. Of course, I can’t look at your Sent folder emails and tell you what to delete, only you can do that. You have to decide. Still, I’m willing to bet you can get rid of some of those emails without a problem.

My next clean up idea has to do with emails with attachments. Instead of saving an email with attachments that has no real content, you should save the attachments to your computing device and then delete the email. Example: your son or daughter sends you an email with pictures attached of your grandchild looking cute and adorable. In the email itself, there is no real content; perhaps, something like “pictures from the park are attached” and there’s nothing else written. There is absolutely no reason to keep the email. It’s the attachments you want, so save the attachments and then delete the email. You can free up a ton of space in your email by doing this one step. Try it!

If you have created your own folders, you should sort through those and make sure there’s nothing outdated. The other day, I was helping a customer sort through their folders and the customer told me he had emails from 10 years ago about a property he sold nine years ago. There really was no reason he could see for keeping them, so he deleted them.

The Draft folder is another place to look. Many email software programs will create a draft as you are writing an email. If you get interrupted or if you save as you write, emails will appear in the Drafts folder. You should have a look in this folder and if any emails appear that are no longer needed, delete them!

The final folder to spend some time perusing is the Junk a.k.a Spam folder. Actually, you should be looking in the folder every day for this reason: if something went into the folder that isn’t junk or spam, you need to mark it Not Junk (or Not Spam) so it’s not automatically deleted. Usually, when you do this, the email will return to the Inbox. Just like the Deleted/Trash folder, this folder should be emptied from time to time.

So that’s it for cleaning out your email. Depending on how many emails you have, this whole process could take 15 minutes or 15 hours! Why not give it a try?