Inbox Cleaning is a Time Machine

The sense of elation one gets from being liberated from the shackles of an overcrowded inbox is wonderful. A personal milieu long polluted with marketing outreach, subscription alerts, and welcome-back offers. In my own case, this number reached a staggering 34,985 emails over 7 years. This is excluding those automatically screened out by Google’s super-human promotional material-detecting algorithms.

2021, for me, represents an opportunity to start anew with a tabula rasa on a number of fronts, including a new job, a new house, and — motivated by a new years’ resolution — a renewed effort to be more selective and thoughtful about my communication with others. “What better place to start than the inbox?” I ask myself.

As I navigate to the home screen in Gmail I select the “All” option, and click the prompt to “select all 34,985 emails” and add them to a new label I’d just created called “Until 2021–01–12” and click “Move”. The operation fails as I begin to wonder if I’ve actually managed to overwhelm a titan of Silicon Valley through my inbox neglect. It appears that there’s a limit of a few thousand per operation, so I’m going to have to endure the agony of sorting through numerous “segments” to get to my goal of a clean inbox.

As I begin to move through the bulk selections I’m forced to glance at snapshots in time, one-by-one, of my life over the last seven years. Messages from family, friends who have come and gone, purchase orders, and an overwhelming tide of notification emails and spam messages. I meander through these segments as someone might along the beach, glancing at the occasional seashell strewn among an incalculable volume of sand. The journey takes me back through memories, conversations, and shared experiences. A season recap before a new chapter.