Hotmail’s excellent new decluttering function,Sweep, arrived – for me anyway – in the nick of time. I was getting progressively uneasy about the hordes of emails accumulating in my Hotmail Inbox.
You know what happens if you have a Hotmail account. You see 30 new emails every day. There are the ones from friends, acquaintances, companies and organisations whose newsletter you’ve subscribed to. Then there are those circulars which do the rounds (almost always sent by women, I’ve noticed – why?) They give you little homilies or tell jokes about sex or aging or sometimes show remarkable pictures of wildlife, Paris or weird sculptures.
Then there’s the TV program for the night. No idea why I get that. And – lest we forget – for those whose sex is male or else not apparent from our email address, there are the wonderful discount offers for Viagra, ViAg-ra, Cialis, Ci-a-liS along with propositions to Exten-d yur Man Ho0d at disc-ount Ratz.
As you go through all this in your Inbox you read a few, reply to a few, Junka few (Viagra, Cialis, Exten-d yur Man Ho0d…) and Delete a few. But lots of them sit there waiting to be dealt with ‘later’.
“Can’t face deleting all that now” you tell yourself. “I’ll do it later.”
Well, in this household, later was yesterday. Hotmail told us back at the beginning that we had lots of space for our mail. Then they kept telling us we had ever-increasing space. So we relaxed and let the incoming mail flow. But when you have over 1000 emails hanging about in there you get to a point where you really want to declutter.
But deleting emails one by one, in my Hotmail account at least, was ridiculously slow. I gave up last night after laboriously selecting one email after another for what seemed like an age.
And then this morning, the first thing I saw when going to Hotmail was a message about Sweep. It’s incredibly simple, quick and effective. You select a message from a sender and click Sweep on the taskbar to get rid of all that sender’s messages. And that’s it – they disappear.
Often you’d just want to get rid of his/her messages-to-date because you’ve read them – you don’t want to block their new emails. But there’s also an option to block all further messages from that sender if you want to.
I just decluttered my Hotmail Inbox in seconds, getting it down to a reasonable size, getting rid of old emails I don’t need and blocking a few senders I don’t want to hear from in future.
Sweep’s a great addition to Hotmail. I wonder why it was such a long time coming.