I'll start: mine hit the thousands before I finally did something about it. I'm convinced there are two types of people — inbox-zero people, and "I have 60,000 unread and I've made peace with it" people. No judgment either way 😅
Drop your number 👇 — and if it's a wild one, how did it get that bad?
I've been on a mission to tame my inbox and figured I'd share what's actually helped — and hear what works for the rest of you.
What's made the biggest difference for me:
The thing I still find genuinely annoying: figuring out which senders are actually safe to unsubscribe from vs. the ones I'll regret losing (appointment reminders, order updates, etc.). I still second-guess it every time.
So — what's your system? Anyone cracked the "which ones are safe to cut" problem, or found a routine that actually sticks?
I've been on a mission to tame my inbox and figured I'd share what's actually helped — and hear what works for the rest of you.
What's made the biggest difference for me:
Unsubscribe instead of delete. Deleting a newsletter just means it's back tomorrow. Unsubscribing kills the source. I set aside 10 minutes a week just for this.
Filters/rules for the repeat offenders. Anything I don't need to see immediately (receipts, newsletters I DO want, notifications) auto-skips the inbox and gets labeled. My inbox becomes "things that actually need me."
The one-touch rule. When I open an email, I do something with it — reply, archive, or unsubscribe — instead of leaving it to reread later.
Searching "unsubscribe" to batch through the marketing stuff in one sitting.
The thing I still find genuinely annoying: figuring out which senders are actually safe to unsubscribe from vs. the ones I'll regret losing (appointment reminders, order updates, etc.). I still second-guess it every time.
So — what's your system? Anyone cracked the "which ones are safe to cut" problem, or found a routine that actually sticks?
I've been in the job-application grind lately, and something finally broke me: every Greenhouse, Lever, and Workday form asks for the exact same things — name, email, phone, work authorization — and you type it all again, every single time.
So I built Job Application Autofill. You fill your info in once, then click one button on any application and it fills the matching fields for you. It can't auto-attach your resume (browsers block extensions from touching file uploads), so it just highlights that field so you don't miss it — everything else fills in a second.
A few things I learned building it:
- The hard part wasn't the autofill, it was that every site's form markup is different, so I match fields by their labels/placeholders instead of hoping field names are consistent.
- LinkedIn's "Easy Apply" renders its form in a nested iframe, which ate a full evening.
- My first Chrome Web Store submission got auto-rejected for "keyword stuffing" because I listed every supported site in the description. Lesson learned.
Free for the first 10 fills. Not trying to build an empire — I mostly wanted this to exist for myself.
Would genuinely love feedback — what sites should it support next, what's broken, what's confusing:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mdlelmgbdnjpogndeongogbkbmeakgnh
Just published my second Chrome extension: Inbox Cleanup.
You click "Scan my inbox" and it uses AI to tell you, in plain English, which emails are safe to unsubscribe from or archive — grouped by sender, so a newsletter that sent you a dozen messages is one line to clear.
The part I'm most happy with: instead of only helping you delete, it also pulls the few genuinely important emails (a real person writing to you, something time-sensitive) to the top — so decluttering doesn't bury what actually matters. Every other cleaner I tried is purely subtractive.
Technical notes for this crowd:
- Uses chrome.scripting.executeScript on demand + a side panel, so it only touches Gmail when you click.
- Classification runs server-side (Claude) — the extension only ever sends sender/subject/snippet, never full email bodies.
- You stay in control: it selects the emails, you click Gmail's own Archive/Delete to confirm. Nothing's removed automatically.
Free for the first 20 classifications. I'd really value feedback — edge cases, what's confusing, what you'd want next:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ihjniamghhnfgkgmplhgodbbgiibbjpg