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Posted: Fri 10th Jan 2025
You wouldn't want to leave large piles of old mail, magazines and advertising flyers cluttering up your physical space – so why should your email inbox be any different?
Cleaning out your inbox is about far more than deleting old messages from months or even years ago. Rather, it's an often-overlooked practice that can do wonders for your productivity and focus, guard against spam and – perhaps most importantly – help reduce digital waste.
You might be tempted to think of digital waste as old electronics/devices, like mobile phones, laptops and digital cameras. And you wouldn't be too far off. Digital waste, however, is more about the data all our internet-connected devices generate.
Digital waste, at its most basic level, is any stored data that doesn't serve a useful purpose.
This data can be anything from internet downloads and long-forgotten photos to gigabytes upon gigabytes of old, archived email messages often stored on massive cloud servers. All those cloud servers require electricity and cooling in order to function – and this generates carbon emissions.
First – let's set the scene: According to Statista, more than 347 billion emails were sent per day in 2023, and that number is expected to top 376 billion by 2025. What does that massive figure mean in terms of our carbon footprint?
Emissions researcher and writer Mike Berners-Lee has calculated that a typical email generates about 0.3 grams of CO² emissions. A long email that takes 10 minutes to write and three minutes to read generates up to 17 grams of CO².
Berners-Lee also estimates that a normal business user creates 135 kg of CO² emissions from sending emails each year! The total amount of emissions created by long-term email cloud storage, however, remains largely unclear.
Keep in mind that all of these CO² emissions figures take into account the power used by data centres and cloud servers, as well as the computers used to send, filter and read messages.
Barring any radical advances or changes, we're not going to get away from email anytime soon, but we can take meaningful steps to reduce the digital waste stemming from cluttered inboxes.
Delete useless/unneeded emails: Take the time to sift through your inbox and delete all the promotional or special offer emails. Also get rid of anything that's no longer useful or relevant to keep. Once you delete these emails from your inbox, they'll no longer be stored on your email provider's server.
Regularly empty your trash and spam folders: Go through your trash and spam folders and permanently delete anything you find there. Yes, some email clients will automatically empty those folders after 30, 60 or 90 days, but deleting everything manually reduces the time those emails spend sitting idle on the server.
Use of the "unsubscribe" button: It's completely normal to have subscribed to many different promotional emails from your favourite shops, newsletters – and more over the years. If you decide you don't want to receive those emails anymore, look for the "unsubscribe" button.
Avoid sending unnecessary, one-word emails whenever you can: Politeness is never a bad thing, but sending one-word emails, like "thanks", or "that's great" or "sure", just unnecessarily adds to inbox clutter and digital waste.
Cut back on large attachments whenever possible: Aim to limit your attachments and file sizes. The bigger the email, the more energy it requires to deliver (and store). For instance, a massive .pdf file can drive up emissions by up to 50 grams of CO2 per email. Instead – replace those bulky attachments with sharing links.
In addition to helping reduce digital waste, cleaning out your inbox can have positive impacts on your daily workflow:
Enhance your focus: A less-cluttered inbox keeps you from getting distracted by irrelevant or old emails.
Boost productivity: With a chaotic, crowded inbox comes a far greater risk of losing or overlooking important messages and missing deadlines.
Improve your security: Keeping a clean inbox can help you more easily identify potentially fraudulent, suspicious or harmful emails.
Regular digital housekeeping can help ensure that you and your business don't end up buried under a mound of digital waste that not only contributes to emissions, but clutters up your own day to day processes.
Cleaning out your email inbox is a step in the right direction.
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