My Emails Are Out Of Control

Introduction

My inbox is FULL. Not in the sense of storage capacity but my mental capacity. Email is here to stay and i have chose not to commit to a zero inbox game. So this is my attempt to using some code to analyze and clean up existing messages. Let’s get some control back.

Code

TLDR; the who_has_email_the_most script loops through 11 times by 30 days in an inbox using an IMAP protocol. Builds a “top FROM” emails then displays it. The mark_for_deletions script handles removing a single from email address at a time.

Data

Mostly newsletters, some transactional. Having a time-to-live on some of these emails would make sense. That’s not a feature i’m aware of so lets just do some data deletion. EDIT: there is a feature called Sweep in Outlook.com that does this.

[('news@e.eyebuydirect.com', 290),
 ('shipment-tracking@amazon.com', 218),
 ('friendupdates@facebookmail.com', 215),
 ('express@em.express.com', 211),
 ('Costco@digital.costco.com', 207),
 ('photos@onedrive.com', 195),
 ('noreply@redditmail.com', 179),
 ('order-update@amazon.com', 178),
 ('Shutterfly@em.shutterfly.com', 159),
 ('REDACTED01@REDACTED01.com', 157),
 ('ProFlowers@news.proflowers.com', 151),
 ('USPSInformeddelivery@email.informeddelivery.usps.com', 149),
 ('marketplace-messages@amazon.com', 122),
 ('microsoft.start@email2.microsoft.com', 114),
 ('redcross@theamericanredcross.org', 112),
 ('REDACTED02@REDACTED02', 106),
 ('newsmax@latest.newsmax.com', 101),
 ('noreply@email.amctheatres.com', 95),
 ('jobs-listings@linkedin.com', 95),
 ('reply@rs.email.nextdoor.com', 93)]

Solutions

• Unsubscribe from the top offenders
• Using a script, delete the top offending emails.
• Created some rules to archive emails via the web portal.
• Run the script top offenders monthly to evaluate who is wasting my time the most

Conclusion

A bit of house cleaning will keep some sanity in my inbox. With the addition of automation, it should get better over time.