What's in your email inbox?

Post date: 2024-10-27 09:46:58

I often see people refer to the dozens or hundreds of messages in their email inboxex, but I never have more than 20 or so. People with overstuffed inboxes, what's in them?

I currently have 14 messages in my email inbox. Several of them are waiting to be processed: they have an attachment that needs to be saved in a particular place, say. Others contain zoom links for ongoing courses or lecture series I'm participating in, and will be deleted when the series ends. One contains a return code for a pair of shoes that didn't fit right.

This is a pretty typical mix for me, and I could clear it down to nothing if I spent twenty minutes to half an hour on it.

I am on mailing lists for things like clothing companies I buy from pretty often, Amtrak deals, a few Substack/Medium/Ghost newsletters and the like, but I tend to move them out of the inbox pretty quickly.

I have a similar amount in my work email account. The heaviest load there is newsletters from the various departments in the community college I work at, and I either glance at the headlines and then trash them, or just trash them, knowing that another will come soon enough.

What piles up in the email boxes of people who end up with dozens or hundreds of emails? My tendency to be email-tidy seems like it might be very similar to the difference between people who clean out the fridge every week before they go grocery shopping, and the ones who do it every six months, which is to say, maybe people have the same kinds of things I have, but let them pile up instead of clearing them out every day. But maybe people are getting interesting and cool things that I'm not getting?

I'm not being at all judgmental. I just literally don't understand how inboxes get that stuffed. Explain it to me.

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