INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
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Are you the sort of person who needs to read and file every email they get Or do you
delight in seeing an email client icon proudly warning of hundreds or even thousands of unread items For some, keeping one's email inbox
with no unread items is more than just a good idea: it's a way of life, indicating control over the 21st century and its notion of
For others, it's a manifestation of an obsessively compulsive mind
The two camps, and the mindsets behind them, have been a frequent topic of conversation here in the Ars Orbiting HQ
And rather than just argue with each other on Slack, we decided to collate our thoughts about the whole "inbox zero" idea and how, for those
who adhere to it, that happens.
Jonathan Gitlin
Back when I had an office job and writing for Ars was a side gig, I was all about inbox zero
We used Exchange in my day job, and I was all about categorizing emails, sorting them into folders, and ruthlessly deleting unwanted
Some of this might have been brought on by the fact that, by default, we were only given a meagre 250MB storage on the server; learning how
to make local archives and backups became a necessity, and in the process you learned to separate the wheat from the chaff
Another factor was probably the nature of my job; as anyone who sits through several hours of meetings a day surely knows, staying on top of
one's email becomes a welcome diversion during the many boring bits.
But in the last few years, that all changed, and the real reason was
At first, it was just with my personal email accounts, but the trend accelerated in early 2017 when Ars migrated from Exchange to Gmail
Now, like my personal accounts, I was accessing it via Inbox
This does some things well but, like all webmail interfaces (to me at least), isn't nearly as conducive to a good bit of spring cleaning as
an actual desktop application
Automatically bundling emails into groups—Promos, Updates, and so on—kept them out of my way, so in addition to never being read they
Before long this all built up; at the time of writing, my personal Gmail account tells me it has 2,661 unread messages
(If you really want a fright, iCloud shows 6,261 unread items!)
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