Inbox zero, stage seven (the story resumes)

You may remember that in our last adventure, I had made the idiot decision to disconnect and reconnect my Grinnell account in Mail.app, resulting in about 180,000 messages appearing in my inbox. To make sure that things were working correctly, I did it again. One consequence of that action is that I could see exactly how many messages Mail.app thought it should download. It appears that I have 518,470 messages in my Grinnell mailboxes. Yay! I beat half a million.

I’ve been gradually re-moving [1] the messages to the archive. But Mail.app and our Exchange server don’t play well together, so there are often cases in which I think I’ve moved a message, Mail.app thinks I’ve moved a message, but Exchange doesn’t [2].

It’s now the middle of spring break, so I’m going to make one last push to get back to inbox zero. Right now, I’m at about 13,000 messages in my inbox [3], 1800 of which are unread, all of which are from 2017. Why so many unread messages? Because the mass of email has meant that I’ve had less inclination to try to get to inbox zero. Also, as I think I’ve mentioned before, without accompanying processes to make sure that I deal with tasks, it’s hard to just clean out the inbox. But it’s clearly time for a forward push. I have 4800 or so messages from 2017 alone, and that’s with some work at filing and deleting as part of my daily practice.

Of course, I’ve also been mostly off email for the past four days, and a lot can build up over four days. We’ll see where I am after catching up on those four days.

After a day of working through those messages, I’m down to 4,175 and 1,303 unread. That means I had to think about 900 or so messages today [4]. What joy. Worse yet, I have to come back to some of them for a more detailed response.

I’ll see how much more progress I make over the next few days. But inbox zero should be achievable. To make it more fun, I’m going to drop and reconnect my Exchange account, just to see how much has accumulated. Stay tuned!

[1] Not to be confused with removing.

[2] Yes, every so often I remove my Grinnell account from Mail.app and re-attach it, just to see how many messages are left to process.

[3] Plus the ones that Exchange thinks are in the inbox but Mail.app does not think are in the inbox.

[4] 4800-4175 is 625, plus another 275 or so that arrived since I started this morning.

Version 1.0 of 2017-03-23.