The case for never cleaning out your inbox

Mashable’s new series takes unpopular opinions and backs them up with…reasons. We all have our ways, but we may just convince you to change yours. And if not, chill.

Email is a burden on our lives. Just like most of the modern internet, it’s a curse that may have seemed like an exhilarating new communication tool at one point, but has only become a source of daily stress. It brings us down, in part, because we let it.

We generally consider it lazy, inefficient, and overall burdensome to let your inbox grow and fester to the point of chaos. Once that little red counter next to the Mail icon hits a high enough number, you convince yourself it’s a problem that needs to be solved. I’m here to tell you it doesn’t because that little red counter is a jerk who needs to mind its own business.

It really, truly, matters little if you let your personal inbox pile up with thousands of unread emails. Let’s be real, most of those unread emails are for newsletters you signed up for ages ago or glorified Postmates ads that aren’t a great deal anyhow. You have better things to do than to click through and delete that nonsense, and there are legitimate reasons not to do it. The same goes for never deleting emails you’ve already read. 

If you’re on the fence about your inbox curation habits, allow me to make the case why you should just let go.

Think of yourself as an archivist

I’m self-aware enough to know that I’m an unorganized person. There aren’t a ton of benefits to this lifestyle, but I accidentally stumbled into a profound one a few years ago: If you don’t tidy up your inbox, you’ll effortlessly keep around a bunch of important information you might need later.

Seriously! An unkempt inbox is a fascinating digital record of what was going on in your life at any given moment in time. That flight itinerary from eight months ago or that job rejection from five years ago might be useful someday. They very likely won’t be, but you never know. Sometimes it’s as simple as needing to remember the name of someone who sent you something years prior.

Letting my emails pile up has been a great boon to me because I have a terrible memory. Since Gmail’s search function is pretty dang good these days, all I need to remember is a keyword or two and I can find important information that might only exist in an email from 2017. Sure, I could do reasonable adult things like keeping a planner or address book, but Gmail inadvertently does it for me.

Of course, at least 85 percent of the emails I get are automated crap like Grubhub receipts and social media notifications. These things are inarguably worthless and you’d have a point if you told me to get rid of them. On the other hand…what do I stand to gain from that?

There’s little practical benefit to clearing your inbox

When you tidy up the living room or organize your bookshelf in alphabetical order, there are good reasons for it. It’s uncomfortable, inconvenient, and disgusting in the worst scenarios to exist in a dirty room. And aside from looking nice, an organized bookshelf makes things easier to find.

In other words, these acts come with practical benefits. Meticulously clearing out your email inbox doesn’t, or at least not enough to make me care. As I said earlier, if I need to find something, I can just search for it. There are no physical barriers in place. Everyone’s brain works differently, but for me, I just can’t be bothered to fuss about with an obstacle as fleeting and intangible as a messy inbox.

That said, I get it. For years, I was one of you. I tried to keep the number of unnecessary messages in my inbox as close to zero as possible because it felt like the right thing to do. We’ve been conditioned over the years to treat numerical buildup as a nuisance. When you open Twitter or Facebook, the first thing you probably do is clear out notifications, right?

I still do that on Twitter because that hellhole holds outsized importance in my life. This is justifiable in my mind because likes and retweets give me validation for my terrible posts. I get absolutely nothing from combing through my inbox to weed out what I don’t need. If something is important, I’ll see it. If it’s not, it can still hang out. The little guys aren’t hurting anybody.

Before I move on, yes, I know services like Gmail have storage space limits. This is the one of the best reasons to clear out an inbox. Once I get to that point, I’ll do what’s necessary and nothing more.

And as a last note, I’ll acknowledge that email storage has a carbon footprint just like any other internet activity. However, that carbon footprint is minuscule when compared to worse polluters like flying or driving. If you want to clean up your email act to reduce your carbon footprint, I get it. But if that’s all you do to help save the planet, consider making bigger life changes. Perhaps shop less on Amazon.

Life is too precious to care

I understand why people feel the need to keep their inboxes spotless. There are only so many things in this life that we have complete control over, and mass-deleting digital missives with no relevance to you is an easy way to take power over your life. Practically useless as I think it might be, the satisfaction is not lost on me.

But I’m here to tell you that you can let go. A lugubrious inbox situation doesn’t have to bring you down. You can just not care. 

If you’re interested in giving this lifestyle a shot, I recommend giving it a week. If you have an iPhone, go to your notification settings and turn off badges for whichever email app you use so that irritating counter goes away. If you can get through a week without clearing your inbox, you can get through two weeks. If you can get through two weeks, you might as well keep going.

Think about all the other things you could do with the time you spend getting your email ducks in a row. You could achieve viral fame, watch the classic HBO series The Leftovers, make the perfect sandwich, or do literally anything else. Maybe you can find love! That could be fun!

My point is that we have precious little time in this world. Reducing a number on a computer or phone screen is among the very worst ways to spend it, not counting anything that can hurt other people. Go ahead and disavow the notion that email pileup matters at all. I believe in you and your ability to devote your time to more wholesome and fulfilling activities.