Some people declare email bankruptcy in their working and/or private communications. In their time, something went wrong and their inbox is swamped with a bajillion emails – an amount no filter, SmartScreen or Priority Inbox can handle. They delete everything and start over, or even delete their email account completely – hence email bankruptcy.

Others consider email something of the past, like this entertaining post on TechCrunch called Remembering Email. The post notes that social is the answer: we should pursue all our communications through the social platform channels. Instead of having one or two email addresses, use several social networks to communicate. Yaay! I say a bad user blames his tools.

Mastering the ways of email can be daunting when you send and receive a lot, but you can learn in time.

A quote from that TechCrunch post:

Our kids already understand that email is fading. 

No they don’t – they just don’t use it as much as the 20+ demographic group because they don’t have (serious) jobs yet. As soon as they get a job, they will start using email. In some cases, heavily even.

Let’s get one thing straight: you own your inbox. You and you alone are responsible for your email address(es): both the receiving and sending of email. If you receive a lot of email and the important emails get drowned out by all the non-important ones, kill off the stream of non-important email. As much as I love email marketing, too much simply is too much. Cut down on any type of notification emails which are unnecessary. A more extensive list of tips to cut down on inbox load can be found in this post about crowded inboxes.

The point of this post is that there really is a solution, and you alone can apply it. Be happy with your inbox again. Make the “Ding! You’ve got mail!” sound a happy sound again like 10 years ago:

Go forth and own your inbox – never let go!

(title of this post is based on an old internet meme – aybabtu - all your base are belong to us.)

Related Posts:

• Hotmail flags feature added to inbox overview
• Gmail now at 350 Million users, set to beat Hotmail as no.1 used webmail service
• The webmail war is on, it seems
• Email insight: Engagement vs deliverability, how does one affect the other?
• Losing a bet, no HTML5 email in webmail clients

Tags: email bankruptcy, gmail, hotmail, inbox management