Unbloat Your Inbox

I was on vacation a couple of weeks ago, enjoying some fresh powder (6 feet!) and admiring the iPad from afar (no, Steve didn’t check with me prior to scheduling Apple’s Special Event to see if I had a conflict. He’s been warned.).

While on vacation, I wanted to make sure that I was still (somewhat) connected to my crew here at work via my Small Dog email. However, much like the last time I went on vacation, around the second day in a remote location, Mail stopped communicating with the Small Dog email server (or vice versa). It’s probably all a coincidence, but I still wanted to figure out what I could do to make sure Mail and my email stay BFFs.

I have heard grumblings from many people about how Mail and especially Mail for iPhone have issues handling inboxes with a large number of emails. There are several theories about why this is the case, but a good rule of thumb is to limit your inbox to under 1-2K messages. (My last count? Almost 16,000!) This is especially important if yours uses an IMAP protocol, as ours does.

With an IMAP account, it allows users to access their email through multiple means, because whatever actions you take (sending, saving drafts, etc.) always stay synced to the server. (For example, if you have your email account set up on your Mac as well as your iPhone, the same information will be available on both.) So, it stands to reason that once the emails start to stack up, that’s a lot for the server to keep straight, and for it to do so quickly.

So, with the help of our IT Department (who, let’s face it, knows more about email protocols than anyone should), here’s a handy checklist to keep in mind when managing your inbox, whether you’ve had issues with it or you just want to do some preventative maintenance:

1. Keep your inbox under 1 – 2k total messages (apparently, it’s so important, it’s worth mentioning again).
2. Store your messages in a folder outside of the inbox, whether it’s solely on your Mac (“On My Mac”) or a folder that is available on the email server (Mine’s called “SDE” with a subfolder called “Archived Mail”).
3. When moving your messages to your preferred folder, try not to move too many at a time (I like to grab a month at a time, which works out to between 1,000 – 1,500k; ideally you’ll only move a couple hundred at a time, depending on your connection).
4. As you move the groups, don’t move a new group of email until your last one has finished (Open Window > Activity to preview your progress).

Hopefully, you’ll notice that Mail continues to work speedily and consistently. Mine’s been great so far—I’ll continue to mind these tips and to use Smart Mailboxes to keep myself organized and trouble-free.