Clean up Your Cluttered Gmail Inbox: Forward and Archive Emails To Your Evernote Account
To me, Email is one of the biggest distractions which I have to deal with everyday. I have multiple email accounts, my personal Gmail account, my work email, my website email – it’s just too much to keep up with. Unsubscribing from junk mail doesn’t help much as with time, the volume and frequency of incoming emails piles up. Waking up every morning and seeing an inbox filled with hundreds of email is a big turn off for anyone.
What makes matter worse is that I use Gmail’s forwarding feature to consolidate emails in my main Gmail account. I am a big fan of the Inbox zero theory, seldom do I allow emails to remain unattended in my inbox. Read, take action and immediately archive or delete. Overtime, my main Gmail is innundated with so many emails that I find myself lost. Labels and filters are okay but sometimes, I wonder if there is a way to completely clean up my Gmail inbox and archive every single email to a third party service.
This will bring a refreshing change in my email inbox, I can search for old emails in that third party service whenever I need to. The concern here is the clutter and space constraints, I just don’t want to see all the archived emails lie there, killing my productivity and distracting me from work.
Use Evernote to De-Clutter Your Gmail Inbox
If you use Evernote, you can archive Gmail emails to Evernote and completely empty your Gmail inbox from archived emails. Also, you can make sure your future emails are automatically backed up in Evernote, so you can find accidentally deleted Gmail emails from your evernote account.
There are two advantages of using Evernote to automatically backup incoming emails in Gmail. First, all of your Gmail emails gets automatically stored in Evernote, so you never lose any of your emails and can find accidentally deleted emails easily. Second, since you forward a copy of Gmail email to Evernote and delete it from your inbox, you never run out of space. Your inbox stays clean and clutterfree.
Here is what you need to do:
1. Login to your Evernote account, go to settings and copy your unique incoming email address, as shown below:
2. Any email that is sent to this email address will be saved and archived in your email account, so it goes without saying that you should keep this email secret.
However, you can use this feature more creatively when you are working with teams and collavorators. For example, you can share this Evernote email address with all your team members and ask them to forward important emails, files and attachments to this address. This will keep all the important documents, communication logs and files at one place, readily accesible to everyone. However, for the sake of this post, I suggest you to keep your unique Evernote email address secret.
3. To forward emails from Gmail to Evernote, all you need to do is compose your email with the following format in the subject line
@notebook_name #tag_name
So if you have an Evernote notebook named “Work” and you want to archive all your work related emails to Evernote, all you need to do is forward the email to your unique evernote email address and use @work in the subjectline (using tags is optional).
You can follow this technique to backup important Gmail emails to Evernote. A much better idea would be to create a Gmail filter and configure your Gmail account to automatically forward specific emails to your Gmail account and delete the main copy from your inbox.