My Gmail inbox is busy. It has to be this way for my profession, though I don't love a crowded inbox. Nobody does, but unlike many people, I know the trick to keep things under control.
Emails piling up in your inbox make everyone's job harder because you have to make time to clear them out before your Gmail inbox spirals out of control. It also fills up free storage in your Google Account: you lose more with each incoming email.
Manually cleaning up your inbox isn't a trick, because this comes naturally to all of us. Instead, I went the extra mile and built an intelligent system that helped me achieve exactly what I wanted.
I didn't use anything outside Gmail. I built the system using Gmail's built-in features, though it took time to set it all up.
I stopped cleaning up my Gmail inbox, and here is the email system that worked.
I've built an intelligent and multifaceted email system
The system runs quietly in the background
I love hyping up my DIY projects, but I won't exaggerate anything about the email system I built because it can stand on its own. That's how powerful and effective it is.
However, it takes a few minutes to build and test to make sure everything runs smoothly. You may also need someone to help you test, but you can do it without external help if you follow the right steps.
Before I get into the steps, I would also mention that this system needs an additional Gmail address. I call this the core part of the system, and you'll agree with me after you find out its role later in this piece.
To build the system, I also made a few tweaks to my old and new Gmail settings. These aren't hard, but I recommend following them in order: tweak the old Gmail address, and then go to the latest one you created.
I call this a multifaceted email system because it handles many things. It prevents emails from piling up, ensures I can access every email, and lets me reply to them.
The system works so well in the background that you won't feel it's there.
My email system automatically cleans up my Gmail inbox
But I never lose emails
My Gmail cleans up on its own even before I read those emails, while making sure I don't lose them. This sounds like a contradiction, but it's not.
The trick is that I let my old Gmail forward all my incoming emails to a new Google Account I recently created, and then delete the copy from Gmail. The sender doesn't know it, but I access their emails from another account.
This might sound futile at first, but think about the time and effort you'll save in the long run. Although those emails stay in the Trash folder after the automatic forward, they'll disappear after 30 days. So, this is an auto-cleanup of your Google Account storage.
It felt like something magical when I got it working, but after the excitement died down, I asked myself what I would do when an email needs a reply. This is where the second act comes in.
I don't need to open my old Gmail account to reply to those emails, while still making it look like I typed and sent it using my old address. The recipient will get a reply from the email they sent their message to.
To do this, I configured the Send email as option (Accounts and Import page in Gmail's Settings) in the Settings of the new Gmail account. I put my old email address and confirmed it was mine.
However, I strongly recommend against using third-party email addresses to set up this system.
To keep everything running smoothly, both the old and new email accounts must be Gmail, because Google will stop supporting the "Send as" feature for third-party addresses, like @yahoo.com and @outlook.com, starting in January next year.
I didn't make that mistake because Google is my favorite email provider, and these two Gmail features have been instrumental in building the intelligent email system that saved me from manually cleaning up my inbox.
I'm sticking with this Gmail setup
None of this is unique to Gmail, but I would still give Google credit for this because it's my primary email service and I have no plans to replace Gmail with something else.
This was not a mere experiment. I made it because I needed it, so there is no point in going back to the old way. It does the job in the background without making me realize the system exists. It saves me time and effort.