It's time to clean your inboxes!
You don't have to get them to zero and entirely void of any and every email, but you can get rid of a lot of the clutter that lives in there. Just think of all the newsletters, order confirmations and blasts about sales that ended months ago taking up space in your inbox and adding to the growing number inside the red notification bubble.
One of the easiest ways to stop the clutter before it starts is to unsubscribe from the emails you never, ever read. If you're not reading it, it's just taking up space and making it harder to see the messages you care about. To unsubscribe from most emails, scroll to the very bottom and look for the hyperlinked "unsubscribe."
Watch this video for easy tips on how to clean the clutter out of your email inbox.
Don't let the task of cleaning up your inbox be a daunting one.
One of the easiest places to start is by using the search feature. Search for senders you regularly see in your inbox but usually don't read. Easily select all the emails from that sender and delete them. If you notice most or all of these are unread, take a moment to unsubscribe before sending them to the giant trashcan in the computer in the sky.
You can also search via specific senders, company names or keywords like "sale" or "%". Repeat this as necessary.
Once you've cleared up your inbox, navigate over to your junk mail folder and empty it. Then, get rid of all of the emails you deleted by emptying your trash.
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If you use the native Mail app on an iPhone, you may have noticed that sometimes deleting an email on your device doesn't actually delete it.
Emails are the only inboxes that take up space! If you're an avid texter, clean out those inboxes, too.
You don't have to delete the chats you use regularly, but there are probably some spam texts, authentication codes, GIFs, pictures and more to which you'll happily wave goodbye.
WhatsApp and iMessage have easy ways to find and dispose of the chats and media taking up space on your device. To find this information for iMessage:
To manage your WhatsApp storage:
Deleting media from either of these apps only removes it from the chat or thread that it is in. If you saved the photo or video onto your device, it will still be in the app or folder it was saved to.
You can also set your iPhone to automatically delete texts after a set amount of time. To find this setting:
Deleted messages live in your recently deleted folder for about a month until they are permanently removed from your device. If you have multiple Apple devices logged into the same Apple ID, this setting will need to be changed on each device.
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