How to Keep your AOL Emails Organized and your AOL Inbox Clean in 2022
Staying on top of your AOL emails can be tricky, especially in 2022 when so many of our professional and personal interactions have moved online. It’s easy to let things slide and end up with a cluttered AOL inbox filled with junk mail and unneeded newsletters. However, in the end, leaving your AOL inbox in this state will mean spending more time and energy trying to sift through the mess to find what’s important.
There are a few simple steps to get your AOL Inbox organized and keep it that way, and we’re going to go through them one at a time so you can get back on top of your email management.
How to Clean an AOL Email Inbox
If you’ve hit your AOL email storage limit, or just find yourself under a deluge of unneeded messages, it’s time to clear out the clutter and get your AOL inbox clean again. Let’s take a look at cleaning up your inbox, before exploring how to keep it that way (with much less work!).
Sort and Delete
To get the process started, you’re going to have to put in some leg work and there is no way to avoid it. That means manually deleting messages that you’ve let build up – don’t worry, it doesn’t take as long as you might think and after this one time, you can automate everything!
To delete individual emails in AOL, you need to:
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Go to the folder containing the emails (unless you have set up multiple folders this will simply be “Inbox”)
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Check the box next to each email you want to delete
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Click the delete icon.
If you’ve got thousands of emails to delete, going at it one-by-one is clearly out of the question. However, you can also delete multiple emails in AOL Mail by:
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Go to the folder containing the emails (unless you have set up multiple folders this will simply be “Inbox”)
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Press and hold the “Ctrl” key while selecting the messages you wish to delete OR press and hold the “Shift” key, click the first email you want to delete, then the last (on that page) OR press "Ctrl” and “A" to select all of your email messages
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Click the delete icon.
To give some structure to your cleaning, try sorting your AOL inbox by date. There is a good chance that you’ve still got emails hanging about from years ago – what is the chance they’re still relevant?
Create Folders and Organize your AOL Mail
After deleting the messages you don’t want, you’ll be left with a lot that you don’t need to act on right away but need to keep for later. To keep your AOL inbox clean without having to delete everything is to create folders – for example, you could create “work”, “family” and “friends” folders, then put emails from those recipients into the relevant folders.
Download Things That Matter
This is mainly a step for attachments, which can be downloaded to free up space in your AOL inbox. Downloading attachments also makes them available if anything were ever to happen to your email account. However, it’s not only attachments that can be taken offline – emails can be downloaded as well.
AOL actually has its own offline feature called the Personal Filing Cabinet (PFC), which allows you to download, store, organize and read emails offline. To download multiple AOL emails:
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Go to the folder containing the emails (unless you have set up multiple folders this will simply be “Inbox”)
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Press and hold the “Ctrl” key while selecting the messages you wish to download OR press and hold the “Shift” key, click the first email you want to download, then the last (on that page) OR press "Ctrl” and “A" to select all of your email messages.
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Press the Save arrow, select "On My PC" and the location to download the email.
Alternatively, you can download individual messages by:
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Open the email you wish to download.
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Select the "File”, click "Save" or "Save As", select a location to save the file, enter a name, and click "Save."
Now, it’s time to look at how to keep it clean!
How to Keep Your AOL Email Inbox Organized
Cleaning up your AOL Mail is only half the battle – now you’ve got to keep it that way. Let’s take a look at some of the steps you can take to make your emails more manageable and your inbox less intimidating.
The best way to stay on top of your AOL emails without them taking up all your time and energy is by using email productivity software, like Spike. You can use Spike to centralize all your email from all accounts into a single place – from there, you can use a host of powerful tools to manage your emails and supersize their capabilities with other productivity features from Video Meetings to Voice Messages and a unified Calendar.
Unsubscribe from Anything You No Longer Need
If you’ve been surfing the web for more than a day, chances are you’ve signed up for one or two mailing lists that you either no longer need or never really wanted to be on in the first place. Unsubscribing from these is a great way to ensure that your inbox isn’t filled with junk again.
However, there will also likely be plenty of emails that aren’t really urgent, but aren’t quite junk – this is where filtering your AOL emails helps. You can do this manually with folders, as mentioned above, but realistically the task should be automated. Spike offers Priority Inbox for exactly this.
Priority Inbox delivers your most important messages to your inbox and sends everything else – those mailing lists and e-receipts – to the “Other” inbox. This keeps your inbox clean so you can focus on the important emails and deal with the rest at your leisure.
Archive Emails on the Go
Archiving emails is a vital part of keeping an organized inbox while not losing important emails to the void. The way archiving works is essentially by taking emails from your inbox and storing them in a separate, secure, yet easily-accessible location. To make sure you don’t get overwhelmed, try to archive emails as soon as you no longer need them. This will stop them from piling up and cluttering your inbox.
To archive emails with Spike, you:
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Right-click on the email or select multiple messages within your inbox
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Click Archive
It’s as simple as that! More importantly, Spike lets you archive your AOL emails on the go with a mobile app for Android and iOS. This means never falling behind and getting overwhelmed – and it’s super simple to do:
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Swipe left on the email on your phone
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Select “Archive” in green
Organize Your Emails in a New Way
Sometimes, email inboxes get cluttered because it’s hard to deal with all those confusing threads and jumping conversations. After a while of trying to detangle the web of messages, you give up and your inbox slides back into a mess. How do you fix this? By approaching emails in a whole new way.
Email is slightly unnatural because the message is messed up by headers, signatures, and all the other clutter that’s included with them. Spike has created Conversational Email to solve this problem – delivering your AOL emails in the style of an Instant Message. This makes everything clear and to the point, so you won’t get cluttered again.
What’s more, Spike doesn’t have to be built around email chains and confusing threads, it offers People mode, which arranges all your emails by contact, along with any relevant information such as attachments, social profiles, and more. Communication as it should be – from one person to another.
Clean it Up and Keep it Clear
Cleaning up your AOL Inbox and keeping your emails organized can be a daunting task, but follow the tips above and you’ll be managing your emails like a pro in no time. Just remember to tackle the problem head-on through sorting and deleting, then get the tools you need to make the ongoing organization as simple as possible.