When Clearing Out Your Inbox, Trying Sorting It by Sender

There are a lot of methods to try in the never-ending quest for a way to sort through and slim down our bulging inboxes. They're different enough that there's certainly one out there that matches or comes close to matching your exact needs, but they do all have one thing in common: They rely on the chronology of when each email came in. Let’s try turning that approach on its head, and instead, sort by sender to weed through the mess.

Why you should sort your inbox by sender

When purging your messages, you probably have an organizational system you follow, like the 4Ds. You go through and decide what gets deleted, done, delegated, or deferred—but there’s not much pattern recognition if you’re just starting at the top and working your way down. Every day's demands or outreach might look different depending on what you have going on at that time.

Sorting your inbox by sender instead of most recent helps you see whose (or what) messages you receive most. If it’s a newsletter or mailing list, you can delete them all in one go, but if it’s a specific person at work, you might get a signal that they tend to need a response from you. From there, you can prioritize their emails, maybe adding them as a favorite contact or paying special attention for new correspondence from them, since you know their messages are more consequential than others. Even if you're using the one- or two-touch methods, which call on you to open every single email the moment you get it, this can be helpful because you'll feel a sense of urgency around specific senders once you identify the patterns.

So instead of deleting or delegating emails one by one, you can try nuking or dealing with entire batches from certain senders to make the sorting process faster.

How to sort by sender in Gmail

In Gmail, if you’ve already found a message from the person or entity whose emails you want to bundle up, you can right-click it from your inbox and hit “find emails from.” This brings you to an inbox only of messages from that sender. You can also access this inbox by typing “from:[their email address]” in the search bar, or clicking the advanced search button and entering their name into the “from” field.

Unfortunately, you can’t sort your entire Gmail inbox by sender, and instead can only make bundles sender by sender, but it still helps with batching them up.

How to sort by sender in Outlook

Outlook is better than Gmail for this method. In fact, it allows you to sort your entire inbox not only by sender, but by other recipients, size, and more.

At the top of the inbox, hit “Filter,” then “Sort by.” Depending on what version you’re running, you may have to go into the “View” tab and hit “From” in the Arrangement group.

The emails will line up in your inbox by sender, making them easy to bundle and delete.