Unsubscribe from all marketing emails

It can get overwhelming very quickly, after signing up to a few online stores. The best thing to do is to change the email settings as soon as the account is created. This way you won't ever need to worry about it later on, and you won't get into the awkward situation where you need to reset your password first before unsubscribe if you end up forgetting it.

There is a nice tool which can help you if it is already too late to start from the beginning. It is called Unroll Me, it will go through all your emails and find the marketing emails. Then show them in a nice elegant list, which will allow you to unsubscribe from them in one click. I would recommend using this if you have no sensitive information in your Inbox because you are giving the company to parse all of your emails. There's no harm in being careful right?

Delete emails you don't need

If there is an email you clearly won't read and never will, then why not delete it rather than letting it pile up in your Inbox? Sure, mail clients such as Gmail has very good search functionality. But they will still slow you down more or less. If you are unsure about an email, definitely keep it. But for some useless marketing material sending it straight to the bin is not a bad idea.

Use Gmail's Inbox App

If organising email is not your thing, then Google's new (well, sort of) Inbox app on both mobile and the web app will make things really easy. It is going for the philosophy that no one needs to delete emails or manage them, the important thing is for their search to understand what you want and always return the emails you wish to see. You can pin important emails and set timers on emails reminders, but there is no need to do anything more. The app is meant to handle the rest for you.

Use Gmail's support for different alias

For easy Inbox management, use the infinite number of Email addresses Gmail gives you. This is a cool tip I learned recently, and you can read more about it here.

One trick you may or may not have picked up about Gmail is that you can add in periods anywhere in the front part of your address and it makes no difference whatsoever: john.smith@gmail.com works just the same as johnsmith@gmail.com. What's more, you can add a plus sign and any word before the @ sign (e.g. johnsmith+hello@gmail.com) and messages will still reach you. If these tweaks make no difference, then why use them? One major reason: filters.

So assume my Gmail address is name@gmail.com. Rather than using this email address to sign up to technology news website, I can actually sign up to newsletters using name.newsletter@gmail.com. With some simple filters, I can easily manage all of my subscriptions from here. It makes it easier to search and maintain later on as well.