33 Comments
User's avatar
John Korzelius's avatar

Last year, my wife and I booked a trip to Northern England. The planning began 9 months prior so you can imagine the accumulation of confirmation emails. As someone who strives to delete delete delete, it was 9 months of low humming anxiety looking at them all just sitting there. During our vacation, I got such joy deleting these emails as we progressed! My wife’s inbox looks a bit like yours and I can’t even look at it. However, I’ve never considered the personal search engine aspect. That does sound useful but, well, it’s a no for me.

Expand full comment
Annabel Port's avatar

I love that you got so much satisfaction from deleting those emails! I do worry though, that somebody will ask you for your itinerary in 2035 and you won't be able to tell them. But I hope you had a great trip! What was your highlight?

Expand full comment
John Korzelius's avatar

Oh Annabel, the whole trip was lovely. Favorite bits were the coastal walk from Robin Hood’s Bay to Whitby. And all our walks in the Lake District. It was dreamy.

Expand full comment
Annabel Port's avatar

Ahh lovely! So glad you enjoyed it.

Expand full comment
Izzy M's avatar

Love this thread! My first email was (almost too embarrassed to write it here!!) welikeitkinky@…… and if you’re wondering, it was “we” because “I” was already taken, and I was very much a 15 year old virgin at the time so it was absolutely untrue 😂. So mortifying now!

Expand full comment
Annabel Port's avatar

Hahaha! I'm so glad that email didn't exist when I was a teenager. I dread to think what I would have come up with!

Expand full comment
Pippi's avatar

Very pleased to say my first email address was punkrockprincess_3000 which I only changed when I realised I couldn’t apply for jobs using it! When I got the occasional scam email telling me they had compromising photos of me I would pretend to be a 40 year old man (I was actually a 15 year old girl) and tell them that I was very disappointed in them. With hindsight, I’m not sure how many people believed that a man of that age had that email address, but no one ever replied! Unfortunately I don’t have it anymore, so there’s no evidence. It was probably mostly chain emails anyway.

Expand full comment
Annabel Port's avatar

Love it! I also love that you pretended to be a middle-aged man.

Expand full comment
Kirsty's avatar

Omg - there are some folk with v embarrassing email addresses they must have got when they were young (I hope). I once had to deal with a very serious complaint and possible law suit from a guest who's email address was something like xxx_foxy_sexy_pussycat_xxx@somewhere.com, it was hard to take the complaint seriously.

We also had someone apply for a senior role with the email address along the lines of RangersCasual@somewhere.com , as if being a football casual was something we'd like in management!

Expand full comment
Annabel Port's avatar

Hahaha! Brilliant.

Expand full comment
Alice's avatar

Not exactly email but I pointed out to my friend that she had 76 tabs open on her browser. She said it was actually 276 as she didn't know how to close them but the browser would only show 2 digits!

My other friend then said she had over 600. I don't know how people can live like this.

Expand full comment
Annabel Port's avatar

Okay, I draw the line at this. This makes me feel ill. I truly cannot understand this chaos. Plus, if I have more than three tabs open, my computer starts making that fan noise, which drives me mad.

Expand full comment
Alice's avatar

It was on their phones! Dreadful.

Expand full comment
Annabel Port's avatar

PHONES?!? I feel even more ill!

Expand full comment
Shane Clarke's avatar

My Inbox is my To Do list. It's a rather sad reflection on my dull, but highly organised life that there are just five e-mails in there, none unread. Concert tickets for Pet Shop Boys and Richard Ashcroft are the highlights, plus the latest one from your good self, of course!

Expand full comment
Annabel Port's avatar

I'm so glad I made it into the five. Temporarily. As I strongly suspect it is gone now!

Expand full comment
Becky's avatar

I almost didn't finish reading the post as I'm physically twitching at this. I was so happy at your efforts to unsubscribe and delete, until you gave up. I...just don't know how you do it. Hoard them. Not delete. I think my reaction to your hoarding is equally as strong as your reaction if you got rid of the emails.

I want into your Gmail so I can unsubscribe for you. Or at least delete the Uber Eats.

Expand full comment
Annabel Port's avatar

I've got some good news for you. I unsubscribed from Uber Eats yesterday. I'm sure they'll find another way to email me, which will then take me 8 years to get rid of though.

Expand full comment
Becky's avatar

This warms my heart.

Expand full comment
Cheryl Mills's avatar

I also have no interest in deleting emails. Currently at 66,243. I just don’t even notice and like you I have to use them to look stuff up all the time!! I once tried to file them in neat files like ‘tickets’ and ‘kids’ but that was just so hit and miss and if I ever looked for anything it wouldn’t be in there. I’ve given up trying to be organised now, although I usually think I’m the perfect planner and handbag away from changing my life!

Expand full comment
Cheryl Mills's avatar

The Amount of times I have to scroll back through WhatsApp to find addresses! Although once my daughter showed me how to search for things on WhatsApp that was a game changer.

Expand full comment
Annabel Port's avatar

There should be public information broadcasts about this.

Expand full comment
Annabel Port's avatar

It's so useful. I was wondering also if other people delete their texts and WhatsApp messages, as they also serve as an address book and list of birthdays etc.

Expand full comment
Colin Anderton's avatar

I too was an early adopter to the Gmail club. Do you remember that initially it was @googlemail and they only moved to include the shortened version a bit later? But all my logins are @googlemail.com so I reckon I've wasted 4 months of my life typing "oogle" unnecessarily for every login. And I'm too lazy to change it. But on a positive note, I can often get a second batch of offers by also registering the @gmail ending as they both land in the same inbox but the corporate machine hasn't cottoned on. There's a thrifty tip for you. Imagine how many Ubereats offers you can ignore now.

Expand full comment
Annabel Port's avatar

This is the kind of tip I live for! Thank you.

Expand full comment
Jeanette Esau's avatar

Ha! I still use my first email account @hotmail. Instead of feeling old, I choose to think of myself as cool for having had an email account since the late 90s (another century!).

I do have Gmail and believe it would be impossible to have an Inbox Zero with all those dumb tabs. I won’t embarrass myself with my Gmail numbers.

Looking forward to hearing about when you hit 100K!

Expand full comment
Annabel Port's avatar

Oooh you've reminded me that I used to have a hotmail account. Who knows what treasures lie within? Probably just notifications from friendsreunited.com. I've just tried to access it but the password has long since escaped my memory.

Expand full comment
Becky's avatar

I don't have my very first email address, but I do have the third iteration of it, an AOL email, the 21 at the end being my age at the time. I'm 47 now. Now that I think about it, I think my other AOL address (used for about 5 things) is even older by a year or 2.

Expand full comment
Annabel Port's avatar

You must've been an early adopter, as I'm only a few years older and didn't get my first email until my mid-twenties. But I'm always late to the tech party.

Expand full comment
Becky's avatar

My older brother was into computers, so I got some stuff early. What I really did with AOL was use the chat rooms, you just happened to also have an email address with your account. I don't remember when I started to use the email side of it.

Expand full comment
Annabel Port's avatar

Ahhh chat rooms!

Expand full comment
Lorraine Smart's avatar

I've just checked and I have 70,268 emails in my inbox - not quite as impressive as you, but getting there!

No need to be organised and have things like address books when you can easily just do a search and find the email your friend sent you 5 years ago when she first moved.

Expand full comment
Annabel Port's avatar

Exactly! So useful. And congrats on the 70,268.

Expand full comment