Somewhat in line with my last post about The Cost of Digital Clutter with my Reading List cleanup, somewhat inspired by Herman's post about Digital Hygiene, and somewhat as a way to procrastinate against some training I don't want to do, I just spent many hours cleaning up my email.
In some ways I actually started this last year, when I migrated off of, and deleted, 6 underused email accounts from past lives. That left me with 3 main accounts. One can't have 3 "main" accounts and still call them "main", so the real goal needs to be to get down to 1, or more realistically 2, because email accounts seem to want you to have a second one as a security measure.
Today was spent not just getting down to Inbox 0 in all 3 accounts (technically 4, as I also did this with my work account), but also purging old folders, old aliases on those accounts, old rules that are probably irrelevant, old stars/flags, etc. Short of purging my All Mail/Archive folders, I wanted it to feel like I was starting fresh. I once purged my Archive in Gmail and regretted it, so no more of that.
This was all just the tip of the iceberg, as the real challenge comes with what I did to those other 6 accounts last year. Migrating all my accounts from 2 emails into the one I choose as my main account, and making sure friends and family update their address books as well. Getting other people to use a different email address was surprisingly difficult.
The hardest part of this is always sites that seem to not want to let you change your email address or delete an account (I'm looking at you Sony). Or places where an email address was provided, but they don't really have a mechanism to change it, as there was no login. This means it likely didn't end up in my password manager either. Have those places ever emailed me? Will they? If they do, will it be important? These are all things that prevent me from wanting to commit fully on this.
For those who have never gone down the rabbit hole of trying to solve their email problems by creating another address, or gave into the FOMO of what another email service may provide, don't. It's not worth it.
I think I will spend the next few months continuing to live in my 3 worlds (Gmail, iCloud, and Proton) to decide which one I should stick with. As of today, this is my pros and cons list.
I have a feeling I'm going to end up going with Gmail as the primary with iCloud as the backup, and trying to find a solid desktop app made for Gmail. Proton is probably the easiest to unwind, as I've had it the least amount of time and has the least integration with other tools I use.
I guess we'll see what happens next time I'm trying to avoid something and turn to email cleanup as my answer. Hopefully I can maintain things until then, inspired by Herman's example.