I have zero interest in inbox zero

A celebration of email hoarding.

An audio version is here for paying subscribers.

My Gmail account, at the time of writing, has 95,233 emails. All this does is give me a thrill of excitement at knowing how close I am to the big 100,000.

Merlin Mann would not be impressed.

He’s the inventor of Inbox Zero, a strategy to keep your inbox barren. He coined the phrase in 2006, two years after I activated my Gmail account, when you had to be invited to join, like it was an exclusive club.

I know it was 2004 as I’ve still got my first welcome email. And the one I sent to my then-boyfriend shortly after, with the words:

This is a new email account that I have set up. Apparently, it is great and the future of email. Wow.

I wasn’t wrong. If you want any other tech predictions, just let me know.

And I like knowing when I set my Gmail up. Some might consider this useless information. Not me! This is what I use my over-crowded inbox for. It’s my own search engine dedicated to me.

If I need an address for a friend, I search for an email where they’d once included it.

I can remind myself how to spell my friend’s husband’s name.

If somebody is asking for Sicily recommendations, I can find the hotels I booked in 2009.

And during these searches, there are lovely surprises thrown up like old emails from my dad or bits of work I’d forgotten about.

It basically allows me to time travel. (Albeit in a fairly restricted way.) How else is anybody getting important information like this?

I do sometimes get annoyed with marketing emails from companies very outside of my interests. For a long time, I was on the mailing list for a private jet company and every time I unsubscribed, they emailed me from a different account. It feels weird now that a private jet company would resort to such desperate and unscrupulous means to get the business of a woman with a pay-as-you-go electricity meter.

But the others I just let flow in as it’s easier than the effort of unsubscribing. And I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings.

I once reached my Gmail storage limit, so I started to mass delete a load of emails. But then I got sad as it felt like I was erasing my history, and instead I PAID to keep them and have more.

This does make me worry that I’m an email hoarder. And that I’m not far off from having a depressing documentary made about me where they get in the digital equivalent of those specialist cleaners in biohazard suits.

I can see that it’s a bit stupid to pay to keep 601 unread emails from Uber Eats. So I started to delete them, but after a year’s worth, I got bored and stopped. I don’t even know why they’re emailing me so much. I’ve only used them once. It’s always just stuff like get 40% off food. And then in small print, but just from this one shop and it was actually yesterday.

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Merlin Mann has now backtracked a bit on his Inbox Zero. Saying everyone took him too literally. Huh? Had he wanted us to metaphorically delete emails?

I think some of this is down to the huge increase in emails being sent. There were only about 80 emails sent in 2004. Whereas in 2024, there were 361.6 billion. Oh, and I forgot to add, PER DAY.

I did the maths on my calculator of how many this was over the year, and it was 1.31984e15. So thrilled to see that e and have no idea what it means. And the same goes for that random dot.

But I mean, that is a lot. Then I remembered that 2024 was a leap year, and it was EVEN MORE THAN THAT.

So Merlin Mann has updated his advice to what he considers to be more manageable stuff, like only checking your email three times a day. Personally, I’d struggle to keep it down to three times a minute. Every time I see the number go up on my Gmail tab, I dart over excitedly. Who could it be? Usually Uber Eats to be honest.

I’ll just check my total again. Great news! I’m now just 4,762 away from the big 100K. I cannot wait to celebrate.

Comments, please!

I’d love to know the total number of emails and unread emails in your inbox. I see this as a very important survey.

I’d also love to know about your first email address. When my boyfriend was a teenager, he had worldwide_gangster@hotmail and used to get strangers offering to buy it off him.

And anything at all email-related.