How to Declutter Your Email Inbox and Take Control of Your Time

Microsoft’s Outlook.com, at one time called Hotmail, lets you keep 15 GB of free storage but urges you to upgrade to 1 TB of storage for $6.99 a month, or $69.99 annually. The subscription includes online backup; access to a more secure, ad-free email program; and use of Excel spreadsheets, OneNote note taking, PowerPoint presentation and Word writing software.

Yahoo and AOL’s mail programs, while still free, are littered with ads. AOL users, who can have up to 5,000 emails but attachment sizes of 25 megabytes (MB) or less, can skip the ads with an upgrade to a paid version for $4.99 a month.

Yahoo, which like AOL has been owned by private equity firm Apollo Global Management since September 2021, has had the most generous free storage since late last year, 1 TB.

Be aware: If you’ve had a Yahoo email account for a long time, your data could have been compromised. Though the new owners have not mentioned recent problems, two data breaches reported in 2016 affected more than 500 million and then 200 million accounts. In 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission fined Yahoo! $35 million after the then-public company failed to disclose one of the world’s largest data breaches, a 2014 hack not disclosed until 2016.

Use an app or delete manually

Meanwhile, what can you do if your inbox has gotten out of hand but you don’t want to pay a recurring subscription fee for more storage? You could do it the hard way and delete like crazy. Or you could pay to have an app do it for you.

The app Mailstrom starts with a free two-week trial, no credit card required, to delete up to 1,250 emails for you. After that it’s $9 a month, $59.95 a year, to keep the deleting going. In other words, Mailstrom does the deleting so you don’t have to.

The app finds the emails that show up most frequently — Google alerts, offers from local stores and the like. Once rounded up, you get to approve their bulk deletion.

Or you could try it the free way, searching for your most frequent emailers such as Google alerts and stores that nag you about their latest sale. Your laptop, with its larger display than a smartphone, is better suited for the cleanup.

Once displayed, click select all and delete them all. You might consider contacting those businesses to move all of the promotional emails to a separate account.

What makes it hard is that Google lets you look at only 100 emails at a time, Greer says. Many people have way more emails in their inbox.

This article, originally published Jan. 25, 2021, has been updated to reflect new information.