Watching Merlin Mann’s “Inbox Zero” presentation at Google. I got inspired to stop saving emails for CYA purposes. I just deleted over 1600 messages that were accumulating in my inbox. I saved less than 100, into a “Deadmail” archive folder.

This is the cleanest my inbox has looked since I got the account in 1987. Yes. The account is now 20 years old. Actually, this is probably even cleaner than that, since it came with a “Welcome” message, IIRC.

I’m going to try REALLY hard to stick to the “actions” philosophy – delete, delegate, archive, respond, do something.

I just went through my email inbox and nuked over 4500 messages. All since January 2005. Anything important is either archived as a project file, or available through the magical wondrousnes of The Goog.

I’d been letting messages just stay in my inbox, using Spotlight and Smart Folders to find stuff easily, but over the last few days the U of C’s webmail client has been warning me (via a friendly BLINKING RED MESSAGE) that inboxes with over 5000 messages are bad, ‘mkay? So, I took the hint and nuked all kinds of stuff. Everything from “status update – February 2005″ to various random ping messages.

I don’t think I’ve trashed anything critical, but should be able to focus a little better on a smaller inbox now. I couldn’t quite get to the Getting Things Done empty inbox state, but it’s an order of magnitude closer.

I realized that there are a few folks that read this blog without the benefit of an RSS aggregator. To each their own, I figure. So, I just installed a handy plugin to let people subscribe to the output of this blog via email.

If that kind of thing turns your crank, head on over to the Subscribe page, where you’ll be provided with links to the RSS and Atom feeds, as well as a handy dandy email subscription form.

I’ve got no idea what this might do to my blog host, so I’ll run the service as an experiment for awhile. Hopefully it won’t smoke any servers. Enjoy!

Update: Hey! It works! Actually, the email that gets sent out contains the full HTML of the post, so it’s a pretty decent way to subscribe.

I intentionally refuse to set an email autoreply (those annoying “I’m out of the office, but your email is very important to me” messages that get spewed onto mailing lists).

Autorepliers are too dump to not spam lists, and I generally check email regardless of where I am, so it’s not like important messages get dropped. Sure, less important messages might get neglected, but that should be the rule rather than an exception…

The NMC list is a perfect example of this. Someone sends a message, and (especially during conference season) it’s immediately answered by a bunch of “I’m not here…” messages. Annoying. I get it. You’re out of the office. Your email shouldn’t care where you are…

ps. this post is the first one I’ve written using the fancy new WordPress Dashboard widget. It’s rather barebones at the moment, but the idea is pretty cool!