Dealing with Bacon Part II

In a previous post I discussed bacon--emails that I've signed up for, yet aren't a high priority. I've been fine-tuning my bacon-wrangling, and thought I'd share my progress in case others would find it useful.

In that past post I discussed the special Bacon folder I created, and how I created rules in Outlook to look for specific senders and move those emails directly into that folder.

Now I have a much simpler method that doesn't require my adding email addresses to my Outlook rule every time a new sender shows up in my inbox.

Because I use Gmail, there's a little trick I can use when signing up for things. With Gmail, it's possible to create on-the-fly email addresses. Let's say my email address is fantasticness@gmail.com (which it isn't). You can create an unlimited number of email addresses by adding + after the username and anything you want, and they will all be delivered to you!

So let's say I sign up for something, and want the emails they send me to go into my bacon folder. Starting with my fictitious email above, I'd sign up with the email fantasticness+bacon@gmail.com. Then, with the rule I have in Outlook that puts all emails sent to that address in my bacon folder, I'm all set! (Other email providers may have similar services--YMMV.)

I can't tell you how wonderful it is to have only important emails in my inbox!

I also use a number of Outlook rules to intelligently put emails into folders based on project or group. I can see them all using the Unread Mail folder, and when I'm done reading them, they are already filed!

This combination of systems has helped me to automate a great deal of my inbox cleanup, meaning I have time for other things. I can't recommend these types of automation highly enough.