Over time, our inboxes can become overwhelmed by unread emails, leaving us unsure how to clean things up or what’s actually important.
That’s why we built Deep Clean––to make it easy to clear out old emails fast, without the stress or decision fatigue.
With Deep Clean, Forage will help you get your inbox to zero no matter how many emails you have—and ensure that you don’t miss anything important along the way.
Here’s an overview of how it works:
Clean Your Inbox Today, Prevent Unwanted Senders Tomorrow
Forage starts your Deep Clean by showing you the senders who have sent you emails over the last week. It groups similar senders together and displays them in groups of five, this way you can take action on multiple senders at once.
With one click, you can archive all emails from each group of senders, and you can choose to unsubscribe from all of them at the same time. If there are any senders you'd like to keep in your inbox you can skip those senders, and archive the rest. This way you can review individual emails from specific senders who may need a closer look.
Deep Clean is designed to be both fast & easy
Cleaning out large backlogs of email is hard because we are forced to make hundreds (or even thousands) of decisions.
The goal of Deep Clean is to get you to Inbox Zero, no matter how many emails you have. However, the real challenge was making sure that you don't miss anything important, while also not getting you bogged down in too many details about individual emails—leading to exhausting decision fatigue.
Triage Senders, Not Emails
When processing large amounts of email, it's easiest to get rid of emails that are obviously not important. The best proxy for the level of importance is who the email is from. That's why we group the emails in your inbox by their sender. Triaging senders is easier than triaging individual emails.
This also doubles as a way to reduce decision fatigue. If all emails are grouped by sender, this lowers the number of decisions from the total number of emails to the total number of senders.
This reduced the number of decisions by about 90% on the inboxes we tested.
Stop Anytime + Archive the Rest
In talking to many of you, we've been surprised by how many different attitudes people have towards their email inbox. Some people are more hands-off—they're happy to have us just archive everything so they can start fresh, while others want to comb through it all and ensure they don't miss anything.
Deep Clean will fetch senders in batches based on how recently they've sent you an email. This allows you to triage as many batches as you want, and then archive the rest of the emails in your inbox after that. Some people only triage one week before archiving everything, while others want to see everything in their inbox.
This design meets you where you are, and allows you to be as hands-on or hands-off as you like.
Intelligent Grouping
Another way to reduce decision fatigue is by grouping similar senders together. This way, you can make a decision on the group as a whole. Deep Clean does this in a few ways:
Group recent senders together: Forage will show you batches of senders grouped by time. This allows you to triage more recent senders first, without getting bogged down by newsletters and promotions from 6-months or a year ago.
Order senders by their frequency: Forage will show you high-frequency senders first, so that you can have the biggest impact on your inbox in the least time.
Group senders by type of email: Forage will group similar senders together so that you can triage senders who send you similar types of emails. For example, grouping senders who send you a lot of marketing emails so that you can make a similar decision across all of them.
Get Started with Deep Clean
As always, you don't have to change your email app to use Deep Clean. You can continue to enjoy your favorite email experience in Gmail, or any third-party mail app.
You can get started with Deep Clean by logging into your Forage account!