(This is a re-post - the first one had some problems with the images)
I don't know why, but I got a wild hair this morning and started cleaning out the e-mail inbox. 
My inbox, my desk, my laundry basket and kitchen sink all have a common reflection of a flaw (probably just one of many) in my character - they are all an unorganized mess. But since I use the Google Apps implementation of GMail, I don't really worry too much about the Inbox. Since Google is all about search, GMail is all about finding old messages in that big fur ball of mail. I've never been one to use an elaborate taxonomy of folders, labels and sorting and such. I just type in a couple of key words and names into GMail's search box and I usually end up with a fairly short list of messages to go through to find the one I am looking for. To be honest, I have yet to not find something I am looking for. And I do save everything - or more correctly, I delete nothing. I even have a hard time archiving stuff to get it out of the Inbox.
Its not quite as bad as it sounds. I do have a number of filters set up to apply GMail labels to regular incoming pieces such as newsletters, e-bills and statements, mail from frequent correspondents, friends and relatives and regular alerts ("so-and-so is following you on Twitter" - I don't know why but I do). Some of these are labeled just to flag them with a bright pretty color so I won't miss them in all the flotsam and jetsam of my pile of mail. But it does come in handy. As I found out today.
So after listening to Gina Trapani on TWIG extolling the virtues of managing her mail using GMail's Priority Inbox and watching her video "Control Your Email Inbox with Three Folders", then thinking back to Merlin Mann's "Inbox Zero" talks and articles, I guess I got to feeling guilty. That and the fact that the counter for the number of messages in the Inbox was north of 1,556.
So we started pruning. I started pulling up labeled groups of messages and got out the machete. I decided I really didn't need to keep five years of notifications from my bank that my statement was available for viewing. Same with the notices from the phone company, AT&T, the gas company and the electric company that my bills were ready for download and payment. I also decided there wasn't much point in keeping all of the Google Voice notifications of pending voice mail messages, so I got rid of a couple hundred of those. Posterous sends out an e-mail digest of all the posts you've subscribed to. Often times I see those on a computer at an office where they have blocked all sorts of stuff, so I end up saving the Posterous post for later and then not getting around to it. Or at least not getting around to moving it out of the Inbox. A bunch of those went today.
But that's when I found something almost magical about this big pile of digital debris. I was going through the old Posterous digests and came across the posts from Andy Inhatko and his trip to Bejing last year. I've always enjoyed Inhatko's writing and enjoyed going back through them. So I'm glad I kept them. Same thing with many, many messages from friends, family members and others. Kind of going down a memory lane looking at what we were talking, what the social and political landscape were two years, three years or even six years ago, when I first started using GMail. So those messages didn't get whacked - just archived out of the Inbox but still safely deep in the bowels of some computer at Google. I can display "All Mail" and then search on a date range and be taken back in time - sort of. I know, sounds kind of dopey, but its still fun.
I didn't get to Inbox Zero. Still, I did make progress.
And I'm not caught up in having an empty Inbox. At least until Google tells me I'm out of space.
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