When Clearing Out Your Inbox, Trying Sorting It by Sender

There are many methods to try in the never-ending quest for a way to sort and refine our bulging inboxes. They are different enough that there is sure to be one that matches or comes close to meeting your exact needs, but they all have A one thing in common: they rely on the chronology of the arrival of each email. Let’s try to reverse this approach and, instead, sort by sender to eliminate clutter.

Why you should sort your inbox by sender

When you purge your messages, you are probably following an organizational system, like the 4Ds. You go through and decide what gets deleted, done, delegated, or deferred, but there’s not much pattern recognition if you just start at the top and work down. Each day’s demands or awareness may be different depending on what is happening at that time.

Sorting your inbox by sender rather than newest lets you see which (or which) messages you receive the most. If it’s a newsletter or mailing list, you can delete them all at once, but if it’s a specific person at work, you might get a signal that they tend to need a response from you. From there, you can prioritize their emails, perhaps adding them as a favorite contact or paying special attention to their new correspondence because you know their messages are more substantial than others. Even if you use the one- or two-touch methods, which ask you to open each email as soon as you receive it, this can be helpful because you’ll feel a sense of urgency around specific senders once you identify patterns.

So, instead of deleting or delegating emails one by one, you can try deleting or processing entire batches from certain senders to speed up the sorting process.

How to sort by sender in Gmail

In Gmail, if you’ve already found a message from the person or entity whose emails you want to group together, you can right-click it in your inbox and click “Find emails from.” This takes you to an inbox containing only messages from that sender. You can also access this inbox by typing “from:[their email address]» in the search bar, or by clicking the advanced search button and entering its name in the “from” field.

Unfortunately, you can’t sort your entire Gmail inbox by sender, and instead you can only create batches sender by sender, but it still helps to group them together.

How to sort by sender in Outlook

Outlook is better than Gmail for this method. In fact, it allows you to sort your entire inbox not only by sender, but also by other recipients, size, etc.

At the top of the inbox, click “Filter,” then “Sort by.” Depending on which version you’re using, you may need to go to the “View” tab and tap “From” in the Arrangement group.

Emails will be categorized in your inbox by sender, making them easy to group and delete.