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Email had been totally depressing me. I felt like it was hovering over me always. Like 10000 fleas hovering over my head and biting me day and night no matter I was in the office or out or at home. And everytime I opened my inbox and saw 15,000 + unread emails it was like a huge misery to my day.

I decided that this summer I would once and for all clear all my emails.

I tried many times before using techniques from articles on the web how to use inbox zero, but franlkly speaking they never worked. I needed serious professional help for such a huge email overload.

The answer I found was a combination of two amazing apps, SaneBox and Mailstrom.

Firstly about Sanebox (@sanebox). I signed up at first for free, and I frankly was amazed how it could intelligently sort out my important emails from those which could be read later. For those of you who are thinking Gmail Priority Inbox, forget it. It just didn’t work for me, it was frankly speaking quite useless. I don’t know how Sanebox does it, but it really sorted out well all my emails, I think less that 5%, maybe less of my emails were ever mis-classified, and I could easily retrain just my moving labels. Sanebox helped me by letting me focus only on the important emails and being able to whittle these down. It took me well over three months of doing this because I had such a huge overload to start with. And I really accelerated this week when I decided to do nothing (basically not even eat or sleep, I have had another all nighter and no food last 24 hours except some salad and peanuts as I write this) except clear my email. 

After being able to focus and clear all my important emails with the help of Sanebox, next was a combination of Mailstrom and Sanebox.

Mailstrom (@mailstromapp) is another brilliant app which lets me see my email and cut and slice it from many angles (Sender, Subject, Time, Social, Lists, Size). You will be amazed that some subjects stuff up your email inbox (long and useless conversations). Mailstrom lets you see this clearly and then in one click archive or delete them all. Because I could process all my important emails using Sanebox, then it made it much easier to archive and delete using Mailstrom. I could just look at sender or subject and remove a mass amount of emails in one shot.

Another thing which was fantastic was the support of both Sanebox and Mailstrom. I received fast an detailed support for any questions, and even personal advice. Amazing service!

So finally for the first time in over three years, my inbox is totally and absolutely cleared. I reached the zen state of INBOX ZERO!!!

I have been using Sanebox for a few months now, and apart from the excellent application which has been an amazing tool for overcoming the tyranny of thousands of emails, the support from Sanebox is amazing. I asked Sanebox for some advice on how to overcome the thousands of emails and reminders I had and the founder Stuart Roseman personally replied with some brilliant advice:

If it takes less than 2 minutes, don’t defer it.  Just do it.

X%   just do it now
Y% forward to someone else for processing
Z% decide this issue will never be that important and you aren’t going to deal with it.  So simply trash or archive it.
W%  put these off into the future **when** they **will** be the “most” important thing for you to deal with

I am doing my best to follow this advice. I can see my in box already climbing down rapidly from (seriously) 10,000+ unread emails.