Black Belt Productivity

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After reading Leo of Zen Habit’s article last Friday at Web Worker Daily, I decided to post about how I am keeping my Gmail clean and slim.

Since I got my Macbook Pro in March ‘07, I have been POPing [1] my Gmail off of the server and using Gmail itself as my online mail archive. I have setup a LOT of filters and tweaked settings so that I can keep a clean inbox and an archive structure that makes it relatively easy to purge unwanted mails.

This setup is good even if you do not POP your email away from the Google servers. You can skip down to Step II if you do no want to setup a mail client to POP your email.

I. The Setup

The first thing that you want to do is setup your Gmail for POP because you have to explicitly tell the Gmail service that you want to POP the mail off of the server.

Log in to your Gmail account and click on the Settings link at the top right near your name. Then maneuver to the ‘Forwarding and POP’ tab. In the second section you will see the settings for POP. You will want to select one of the radio buttons to enable the POP service depending on when you want to enable the POP (either from that moment on, or everything in your Inbox (basically downloading your entire Inbox to your mail client.)). You also want to tell Google to automatically move ALL email to the Archive as shown below.

Now you will want to open your email client (especially if you chose to download your entire Inbox and let your mail client receive all of your mail. That should complete the setup for POPing your email off of the Google servers.

II. The Stars Come Out

I use filters to automatically star any email that I really do not care about keeping forever. This includes newsletters, sale promotions, mailing lists, etc..

I try to setup all my filters to act on the entire domain of the email that is coming at me. So to setup a filter to get all of the messages that I get from Apple (i.e. iTunes New Music Tuesdays, promotions, sales, band reminders, etc.), I set the filter to look for *@apple.com. This should grab all the email that I get from Apple. The * acts as a wildcard so anything could be there and it would still get picked up from the filter.

Now, setting up the filters does take a little time especially if you want to get rid of a lot of email. I have over 45 of these filters set up in Gmail. And I usually add 3-4 everytime I purge my mailbox, but it make cleaning it up so much easier. The nice thing is that you can run each filter right after you make it so that you can see what kind of results you are getting.

After you have gotten a number of filters (or all of them for that matter), you can get down to some serious purging. Go back to your Gmail Inbox and select the Starred link on the left hand side underneath Inbox and see how many Starred items you have that you want to delete.

Now to get rid of them, Select:All in the list above your mail listing. If you have more than 100, you will be asked if you want to “Select all XXX in this conversation.” Click on that link so select every message in your Starred list, and then go to the pulldown menu and select Delete. Confirm that you want to move all of the selected items to the Trash, and hit OK. That moves all of your Starred items into the Trash. Now go to your Trash link on the lefthand side and select the Empty Trash Now link at the top of the message listing, and confirm that you want to actually empty your trash, and BOOM, you’re done!

Don’t forget to empty your Spam listing too! You can do that the same way that you empty your Trash.

I try to do this at least once a month or so. You can see immediate savings:

Before the Purge:

After the Purge:

That is a 13MB savings that I have reclaimed from Gmail. Of course, it is not like I am taxing the Google servers with all of my mail, but every little bit helps.

I hope that you can find some usefulness in my little Stars hack for Google Mail. Please leave in your comments any other hacks that you use. Both Jason and I are avid Gmail users and would love to hear what you guys are doing to improve your productivity with Gmail.

- Michael

[1] POPing your mail off of a mail server downloads all of the contents of your Inbox down to your computer’s hard drive everytime you access your mail account. You do not have the ability to see all of your mail through a web interface (like Gmail) after you perform a POP (unless you say in your settings to ‘Keep mail on the server’.