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Will Larson
@lethain.com

Got to zero inbox on my personal email address(es) for the first time in a decade or so. This was mostly (1) declaring bankrupt on anything older than 6 months, (2) unsubscribing/filtering spammy stuff, and (3) setting up a transient tag for emails I want to *briefly* see lethain.com/filter-old-g...

lethain.comHow to filter out old email from inboxEvery few years I take a pass at reducing the chaos in my personal inboxes. There are simply too many emails to deal with, and that generally leads to me increasingly failing to follow up on important...

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Will Larson
@lethain.com

Maybe the biggest non-documented learning is that you _can_ do things like "in:inbox before:2025/1/1" and then "select all" and "archive" in GMail, but as best I can tell from repeated attempts it only seems to actually work if you leave the window open. even though the messaging doesn't imply that

Will Larson
@lethain.com

(Or I've created a complex, provably false, mythology to explain why it seemed to only work that one time and not the other five times I tried it.)

Danny Page
@danny.page

I'm 98% sure you have to keep it open. I run into the same issue anytime I hit Archive All on the "Promotions" tab and close it soon after. And oddly, sometimes everything BUT the first 50 items are archived.

Will Larson
@lethain.com

Good question. I’m not sure! I think my mail is in a good spot at this point after doing the cleanup. The bulk unsubscribe is a really nice feature imo, and if anything brought me to buy something like this it might be that.