How to Clean Your Inbox: Tools & Tactics for 2025

Email inboxes are more cluttered than ever before.

Important memos are slipping through the cracks, follow-ups are getting lost, and distractions we never asked for keep piling up.

If left unchecked, your inbox will continue being chaotic, but there are strategies you can use to clean up your clutter automatically. With the right system in place, you can take back control—without spending hours sorting through chaos. These strategies and tools will help you manage your inbox efficiently, with minimal effort.

This blog post was created by our partner SaneBox, the ultimate AI-powered tool for automatically cleaning up your inbox (Gmail, Outlook, etc.) so you save time and only see the most important communication for your business. Available on the NachoNacho marketplace with an instant $25 credit and $25% cashback for your subscription.

Email Saturation in 2025

You’re getting more messages than ever before. But why is that?

• The number of emails sent continues to rise every year.
• The AI boom means more bot-created content and more persistent outreach. 
• The average knowledge worker now gets more than 120 emails per day. 

Marketers are smarter at bypassing filters, and bot-powered scams are getting more persuasive. So not only do you have to wade through more emails than before, now you have to sort between what’s real and relevant – and what’s wasting your time.  

Unsurprisingly, 85% of people confess that they’re stressed out by email. Too much distraction always leads to unproductiveness.

How to Clean Your Inbox: Gmail, Outlook, and more

Email isn’t going anywhere: for anything more complex than a quick DM, it’s still the engine of workplace communication. So it’s better to optimize it than to completely ditch it.

Here’s how to take control of your inbox. 

1. Automatic Triage

Managing a high volume of incoming emails can be challenging, especially when traditional filters like “Social” and “Promotions” fail to effectively sort messages. Even AI-generated emails can slip through, making it difficult to focus on what truly matters. 

You need to fight fire with fire – or AI with AI. By using SaneBox, you can train its AI to file emails exactly where you want them. 

Drag a message into the “SaneLater” folder if it isn’t important, and future messages from that sender will be automatically filed where you want them. After a few trainings, your emails instantly organize themselves into custom folders, meaning you’ll only see important messages in your inbox.  

2. Inbox Integrations

Switching constantly between your calendar, inbox, and to-do list can create unnecessary friction in your day. Small inefficiencies—like copy-pasting notes or toggling between tabs—add up quickly. You can remove a lot of friction simply by choosing a few integrations:

• Clockwise can help coordinate meetings via Gmail and even auto-reschedule based on your whole team’s availability.
• Reclaim.ai promotes focus time by blocking time for your tasks based on your calendar and email activity.
• SaneBox makes it easy to turn emails into tasks on an orderly to-do list, simply by dragging a message to your SaneToDo folder.

This means you’re doing less context-switching, which reduces stress and increases your focus – and the benefits compound over time. 

3. One-Click Unsubscribe

Ever get a feeling of déjà vu when a newsletter drifts into your inbox? Not only “haven’t I seen this before,” but “didn’t I unsubscribe from this last week?”

Marketers and self-promoters are deliberately making it harder for you to opt out of their messages. They bury the unsubscribe link in fine print. They make you click through a form that asks why you’re unsubscribing. Or, most dastardly of all, they want you to click unsubscribe…to prove you received their email, so they can spam you even more!

That’s why you need one-click unsubscribe. At SaneBox, we call it the BlackHole – because by dragging an email into the BlackHole, you’ll never hear from that sender again. Ever. 

4. Breaking the Habit

Unimportant emails are filed away. Important messages are at the top of your inbox. Your toolkit is in place, and you no longer need to freefall into Outlook or nervously check your Gmail every five minutes. 

It’s time to build new habits and check your inbox less. Here’s the routine that works for us: 

• Morning triage: Crack your knuckles, take a deep breath, and see what’s flown into your inbox overnight. Action anything that’s urgent and decide the fate of everything else: hit snooze, drag it to SaneLater, or banish it to the BlackHole.
• Lunchtime check-in: Scratch the anxiety itch, briefly. Make sure nothing has hit your inbox that you need to deal with. The other folders can wait.
• End of day processing: It’s your mid-afternoon lull, or maybe you’re waiting for the train home. Take a look at your Digest – this is SaneBox’s executive summary of your unimportant emails, and you can use bulk-actions to get through everything quickly.

With the right mix of good routines and AI-powered organization, you can quickly regain control of your digital life – and never dread your inbox again. 

Sign up for SaneBox now through NachoNacho to instantly save $25 on your subscription + 25% cashback forever!

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