Spring clean and tidy emails and accounts

Spring is traditionally a time for cleaning.
JPCT 150713 Alan Stainer. Photo by Derek MartinJPCT 150713 Alan Stainer. Photo by Derek Martin
JPCT 150713 Alan Stainer. Photo by Derek Martin

Apparently.

So, with that in mind I thought I would mention cleaning up things like old email addresses and redundant contacts and the like.

So let’s start with that. Now I don’t know about you, but I seem to attract email addresses like moths to a flame. Each one has a purpose, so I persevere with them. Then again, some of the older ones I don’t use anymore and in the case of one, it got hacked or spoofed and was being used to send spam.

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So clean up those old and disused email accounts. That is exactly what I did with the one being used for spam and am still doing with some others that I no longer need. When you do it yourself, remember to tell people of the change so they can update their contacts lists.

Speaking of contacts lists, they can get a bit huge can’t they? Why not go through your contacts and trim off the fat? If you have someone listed that you are never going to email, why have them listed? Go through the list, keep the ones you really need and ditch the ones you don’t. Chances are a lot of them will be old addresses that no longer work anyway.

Speaking of trimming your contacts, that applies to social networks as well. Do you need to be friends with someone on Facebook that you met once at a party some years ago? Are the brands you are following on Twitter really worth following? Ask yourself if the things you are seeing when on your social media home page are really what you want to see.

Stop! I am not telling you to remove people and brands if you actually know them. On Facebook especially, things can get - strained - if you start ‘unfriending’ people. However, I can vouch for the fact that there is a lot of social media ‘noise’ when you follow a lot of people. So tailoring who you follow is critical to improving your experience.

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Now then, back to emails. What do you do with all those emails you have sitting in your inbox? Do you organise them into folders, archive important ones and delete the ones you don’t need?

No?

Well you should. Not only will it make things easier to find, but it will also cut down the size of your inbox too. That really is important if you have a limited mailbox quota and even if the sky is the limit, did you know that if you use Outlook or some other mail client, there are likely some file size limits? Older email programs like old versions of Outlook and Outlook Express may have issues with larger files. So keeping file sizes down is a must.

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