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Inbox Zero Method 101: How to Master It
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by
Ludovic Armand
December 7, 2022
· Updated on
We all get submerged with tons of emails every day. And for many of us managing them and keeping an inbox free of clutter can be daunting. Unfortunately, the more we postpone the task the worst it gets.
Luckily for us, a lot of techniques and tools have been developed to help us overcome this challenge, but one, in particular, has become the go-to for a lot of people.
The inbox zero method!
In this article, you will learn about the benefits of achieving and maintaining inbox zero, the steps and strategies you can follow to master it, and the tools you can use to stay there.
Inbox zero is a popular email management method aiming to help you keep your inbox organized and free of clutter by responding to or deleting emails as quickly as possible. The goal is to help you manage your email more efficiently, and reduce the stress and anxiety associated with having a cluttered inbox by keeping your inbox empty or almost empty at all times.
The inbox zero method was first introduced by Merlin Mann on his website 43 Folders. However, the technique gained traction when Mann gave a talk in 2007 at Google Tech Talk. He explained how inbox zero could be used to help people manage their email.
The talk and subsequently the inbox zero method become so popular that a movement around this email management method to stay organized and manage email emerged since then.
On his blog, Mann published five principles to explain the concept:
While a completely empty inbox may seem impossible, many people would argue that the core idea behind the inbox zero method isn't necessarily about having an inbox containing zero emails at the end of every day anymore. The goal is more about being able to deal with the constant stream of emails without having to stress or put too much focus into it.
With the right steps and strategies that we’ll explore below, you'll be able to achieve stress-free email management.
Inbox Zero isn’t just good for your inbox.
According to a study by Atlassian, over-reliance on email to collaborate with team members is consuming a lot of our time in a workday.
The same study showed that we receive on average 304 business emails a week, look at our inbox on average 36 times per hour, and that it takes approximately 16 minutes to refocus after handling emails.
That's a lot of time wasted!
Being more productive and efficient with emails also helps you be more productive in your other tasks.
While achieving inbox zero can prove challenging, it can also be extremely rewarding.
There are many benefits to achieving inbox zero, including:
With so many benefits let's explore how to master the inbox zero method. Here are the steps and productivity tips you can use to achieve and maintain inbox zero.
The first step to achieving inbox zero is to unsubscribe from any newsletters or email lists that you no longer want to receive. This can help reduce the number of emails you receive, making it easier to keep your inbox organized. You can use unsubscribe tools, do it manually via the link in each email, or use an email client, like Missive, with an unsubscribe button to easily send remove your address from the list.
The next step is to create folders or labels to organize different types of emails. This can help you quickly find emails when you need them and keep your inbox organized.
The third step is to create email filters or rules to automatically sort incoming emails. This can help you quickly sort emails into their respective folders or labels so you don’t have to manually sort them every time.
According to the technique developed by Merlin Mann, each time you receive an email you should:
By following these steps and regularly checking and processing your email, you can maintain an empty inbox and stay on top of your email communications.
Achieved inbox zero is great, but staying with an empty inbox is another challenge.
To make sure you’re staying on top of your emails and that your inbox doesn’t fill up again here are some strategies you can use to stay at inbox zero.
In addition to the steps and strategies listed above, there are also some email management best practices you can use to help you achieve and stay at inbox zero. Here are some tips that can help:
There are a number of email management software that can help you achieve and stay at inbox zero. Email clients like Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail, and Gmail can help you quickly sort and organize and manage emails.
For example, here’s how you can achieve inbox zero with Gmail:
By taking advantage of a few basic Gmail functionalities you can declutter your mailbox:
But what about when you need to also manage shared mailboxes?
A tool like Missive can help you quickly respond to emails, stay organized, and achieve inbox zero while collaborating with your coworkers.
Second, there are productivity apps like Todoist, Evernote, and Trello. These apps can help you manage tasks and projects, so you can focus on responding to emails and achieving inbox zero.
We believe Inbox Zero is intended to make you more productive, not a slave to your inbox.
These tips are unique to Missive because we throw a collaborative aspect into the picture. Interesting right?
You can limit to getting 2 or 3 batches of emails per day. This will immediately free up dozens of minutes of your day. We wrote a popular blog post entirely dedicated to this topic.
Batching emails in Missive is quite easy. You can create rules to define when emails should land in your inbox.
When enabled, all emails arriving between 12:00 AM and 7:59 AM won't show up in your inbox until 8:00 am.
By creating an organizational system, you can prioritize messages to easily know what should be worked on first. The system can be as meticulous or simple as you want.
We suggest a product management prioritization framework named the MoSCoW method. It helps you categorize emails into four unambiguous labels:
<div class="process-container label-container"> <div class="label-example red-label"> Must respond</div> <div class="label-example yellow-label">Should respond</div> <div class="label-example blue-label">Could respond</div> <div class="label-example gray-label">Won't respond</div>
In Missive you can create labels and sub-labels in the blink of an eye. But even more interesting, you can create sharedlabels. These can be shared across different teams, coworkers, or through the entire organization!
Using the prioritization method above, try to delegate your "could respond" emails to an assistant or someone in the team that can speak on your behalf.
In Missive you can seamlessly pass the baton to a colleague or assistant with the click of a button. You can even chat inside emails to let others know how a message should be dealt with. If you want we have an in-depth article about delegating to an executive assistant.
You can also easily delegate your calendar for someone else to manage!
Take back control of your inbox and try unsubscribing from most newsletters.
In Missive you can create groups of contacts and then rules to automatically trash emails coming from them. You can create a group named "Spammers" and then a rule to delete emails from them. This is how you can build that rule:
Have a place where emails from strangers arrive, without email notifications. You can screen them and allow important ones to reach your inbox. This is a little different from a spam filter since these emails are not discarded immediately.
Not a lot of email clients have the power to offer this, but Missive does. You can achieve this by creating a rule like this one:
All emails coming from people outside your contact book will be removed from everyone’s Inbox and labeled “To Screen”.
To mark an email as safe, simply add the sender as a contact.
When receiving an email that you need to differ, you should snooze it to a later time instead of keeping it in your inbox.
In Missive, you can snooze messages by clicking the Snooze button. You can also configure often-used schedules, like “After work” or “Early morning”.
Pro Tip Missive is big on privacy, we actively block read trackers so senders can’t know if and when you open their emails. So read emails at your discretion and reply when you see fit, no pressure.
Since Marlin Mann first talked about the concept of inbox zero in 2007 digital life has evolved tremendously. Now there is way more than an email inbox to manage.
There’s social media, chat apps, and even voicemail. And with smartphones and an internet connection almost everywhere, you’re always available to receive and view tons of messages.
In an article published on Wired in 2020, Mann re-explored his inbox management technique to adapt it to modern reality. While the inbox zero method is good at its core, there’s a risk to take it too literally and trying to achieve inbox zero through all means.
Marlin Mann's new take on the inbox zero method is to allow yourself time off and focus on what matters the most to you first. This way you can avoid stressing out with a technique meant to reduce stress caused by emails.
Achieving inbox zero can seem like an impossible task, but it doesn’t have to be. With a few simple steps and strategies, you can easily achieve and maintain inbox zero.
By unsubscribing from newsletters, creating folders or labels, creating filters or rules, responding to emails quickly, deleting emails, and archiving emails, you can keep your inbox clean and organized. In addition, you can use email management tips and tools, and services to help you achieve and stay at inbox zero.
To enhance your email productivity, you could also consider trying one of the best AI email assistants.
The Inbox Zero method is an email management technique that focuses on quickly handling emails as they arrive:
This ensures you never miss important emails and that they don't pile up and cause you stress. The key is training yourself to take action on every email the moment you read it.
Yes, Inbox Zero is a real email management technique with practical benefits. The goal is to handle each email immediately.
While truly having zero emails may seem impossible, even reducing your pile by half will declutter your head and boost productivity. You'll be less stressed and less likely to miss important messages.
The "zero" refers to taking care of incoming emails when you open them so you don't have a backlog of emails to deal with.
July 24, 2025
6 Fyxer AI Alternatives: From email clients to add-on tools
We cover Fyxer AI’s key features and compare them to alternatives like Gmelius and Missive, helping you choose the best tool for your inbox.
As AI continues to grow in popularity, email management is one of the most competitive spaces for AI tools. Fyxer AI has gained a lot of attention, promising to save you one hour a day as your AI assistant dedicated to meeting and email management.
This article will break down what Fyxer AI is and some alternatives that exist in the market.
Fyxer AI is an AI assistant that connects to your Gmail or Outlook inbox. It does three things well:
It genuinely feels like a capable assistant that manages your email directly within your existing Gmail/Outlook inbox. There's no new interface to learn, no complex installation. Just an organized "person" who opened your messy inbox and took over, in a way that still granted you control over what's sent out.
Within 10 minutes of setting up Fyxer AI, all my emails were auto-tagged into one of their default labels (I use Gmail):
To enable auto-drafting of replies, you have to give Fyxer AI's draft prompter a bit of context related to your tone and business.
And here's what an auto-drafted reply looked like:
This is a great experience for anyone who wants to stay in the Gmail or Outlook interface, but really need on-going organization and administrative help because of the high volume of emails that they handle personally.
Like Superhuman, Fyxer AI is focused on inbox throughput—how much faster can you process your emails. Although that's an important goal, often times, it's the wrong goal.
Maybe the question is whether you should be replying to most of those emails in the first place, which we'll get into for some of the Fyxer alternatives.
When looking at Fyxer AI alternatives, we included 3 types:
We'll start with similar functionality and interface and work our way down the list.
Like Fyxer, Gmelius exists on top of your existing Gmail interface so you have a familiar experience with new functionality.
Gmelius also has an AI-powered assistant that auto-categorizes and can draft replies on your behalf. There are small details between the two options, for example:
On the other hand, Gmelius is also a collaboration focused tool instead of a purely productivity focused tool like Fyxer, which means Gmelius has more functionality for teams that work together within an inbox. They have the ability to chat internally on emails, assign emails to others, create automations that run based on certain AI tagging, SLA escalation, and more.
Both Gmelius and Fyxer have a closed AI assistant, meaning you're not able to bring your own AI key and select the models that you work with. This is great for those who don't really have a preference on which AI model they prefer.
From a pricing perspective, Gmelius is a little bit more expensive than Fyxer:
If you're looking for a Fyxer alternative that is a little more oriented to teams but has much of the same functionality and interface, then Gmelius might be the one.
Similar to Gmelius, Hiver integrates directly into your existing email client, giving you a familiar interface to work with. Unlike Gmelius, Hiver supports Gmail and Outlook accounts.
Like Fyxer, Hiver has an AI-powered email assistant that can help you auto-draft emails and auto-label emails based on their contents. Though, like Gmelius, it's not quite as simple as Fyxer's default experience since Hiver's core users are customer support teams working out of shared inboxes.
If you're an executive that's just looking to replace Fyxer's lightweight functionality, without any of the team related features like collaboration, automated workflows, analytics, or SLA monitoring, then Hiver might be a little overkill.
Could you get it to work? Absolutely. Will it feel like it was built for your use case? Probably not.
From a pricing perspective, Hiver's plans that include AI start at $19/user/month billed annually. However, there are limitations on how many AI-drafted replies you can have (20/user/day).
Now we're moving onto tools with more functionality than Fyxer, but will also have a less familiar interface.
Missive is an email client for teams that need to collaborate in their inbox. Like Fyxer, you can create AI-powered email assistants that help you triage, label, and draft replies. Unlike Fyxer, Missive is way more flexible in implementation, which depending on who you are, could be a good or bad thing.
Missive allows you to bring your own AI key and choose your own model. That means if you want to use a specific model for drafting emails versus triaging, you can fine tune that experience.
Since Missive is a collaborative inbox meant for your whole team, your AI assistant can assign and triage emails to the right people, instead of just sorting it in your own inbox. Imagine an old client emails you because you have a long standing relationship, but it's a question meant for your support team.
The same is true for drafting replies, instead of just drafting replies based on your own personal inbox, Missive's AI automations can help your whole team auto-draft replies to customers.
That's critical if you're handling hundreds if not thousands of emails every day. You can get the most common questions taken care of by an AI assistant.
Where Missive lacks compared to Fxyer is it's scheduling and calendar functionality. Missive has a calendar that's good for team visibility but it's lacking any AI assistant features.
From a pricing perspective, Missive is comparable to Fyxer at $24/user/month for plans that include AI automations.
If you're looking for an AI-powered email client, essentially Fyxer but with more features, then Shortwave might be a good fit.
Shortwave has all of Fyxer's AI assistant features right out of the box—auto-drafting emails, default AI categorization, calendar scheduling—and they have some team collaboration features as well.
Since Shortwave is it's own email client, it looks and feels quite different from Gmail and Outlook. It also only supports Gmail accounts. They say there's a workaround for Microsoft 365, Outlook and other email providers, but it's essentially forwarding your email account to a Gmail account, to connect to Shortwave.
If you don't want or need the level of customization and flexibility that Missive has, you don't care to BYOK (Bring your own keys), and you use Gmail/Google Workspace—Shortwave could be a good Fyxer alternative for you.
From a pricing perspective, Shortwave is the exact same pricing as Missive at $24/user/month for plans with full fledge AI functionality.
If you mostly loved Fyxer for it's ability to sort and organize emails, there are AI-powered tools like Clean Email that focus exclusively on that. And for your drafting needs, you can use Copilot or Gemini (depending on if you're a Gmail or Outlook user) as your AI assistant to help draft the occasional email.
Like Fyxer, Clean Email is a tool that works within your existing email client. It has some predetermined categories that it will suggest and label your emails as, and it can learn your preferences over time.
Copilot is a general AI-assistant that comes free with the Microsoft suite. You can use simple prompts like: Check for typos and make it more professional.
Or more complex prompts like:
You're an executive assistant replying to emails on my behalf. Make sure to take into consideration the existing tone of the conversation and match it. If it's a customer or prospective client asking about a specific product question, use https://learn.missiveapp.com/ to find the answer. Do not make up any information.
From a pricing perspective, Clean Email is $9.99/month/email account and Copilot has a free plan typically included in your Microsoft 365 subscription, with Pro plans starting at $30/user/month.
An alternative to Clean Email and Copilot would be SaneBox and Gemini. Incredibly similar functionality and features, with minor differences around user interface. Gemini would also be a better fit for anyone already in the Gmail/Google Workspace ecosystem.
Where SaneBox stands out in comparison to both Clean Email and Fyxer is it's third party integrations. By offering connections to other popular tools like ToDoist, SaneBox allows you to create basic automated workflows within your inbox. Something in between Missive's super flexible and powerful automations and Fyxer's one and only integration to HubSpot.
From a pricing perspective, SaneBox starts at $7/user/month with some usage limits. Google's Gemini has a free option, with paid plans starting at $19.99/month
Fyxer AI offers a compelling solution for tackling email management, seamlessly integrating with your Gmail or Outlook to help you regain valuable time. Its strengths in triaging emails, drafting replies, and note-taking make it a strong contender in today’s crowded AI productivity tool landscape.
However, it’s worth considering various alternatives like Gmelius, Missive, or Shortwave, each bringing unique features and interfaces that could better align with your specific needs.
As AI productivity tools continue to innovate and redefine how we interact with our inboxes, exploring your options will ensure you find the perfect fit to enhance your productivity.
March 25, 2025
Outlook vs Gmail for Business: Which is better?
Welcome to the great business email debate—Gmail or Outlook?
Welcome to the great business email debate—Gmail or Outlook?
Emails are the lifeblood of many businesses. They’re how people inquire about your services, it's how you communicate with clients and vendors, and maybe it's even how you communicate internally with your team.
We'll be doing an in-depth analysis of the two big email providers (Gmail vs Outlook). And give you the information you need to make a decision on which email service you'd like to build your communication system from.
We'll be going over:
There are two ways to create an email with Google.
You can either have a free, personal email address that ends in @gmail.com, with limited storage (15gb across your Google Suite), or you can pay for Google Workspace (Gmail for business) and create an email address with your business domain: @yourcompany.com, have more storage, and more admin/security controls over your email service.
The Google Workspace business plans vary:
Whether you have a Gmail account or a Google Workspace account, your inbox will look similar.
This is where Google shines. Their real-time collaborative documents were a game changer when they launched back in 2006 and has become the preferred tools for many organizations since.
When looking at Gmail's security measures for Google Workspace accounts, here are two that stand out:
Gmail uses TLS for email transit and has encryption at rest and in transit.
With over 1.8 billion Gmail users worldwide, there are some very well known issues and tradeoffs within the Gmail's functionality. Here are three common ones:
Like Gmail, Outlook is Microsoft's free, personal email service; Microsoft 365 is essentially Outlook for business, equivalent to Google Workspace.
Here's an overview of the Microsoft 365 plans (assuming an annual payment, as of April 1, 2025):
With thousands of enterprise customers, Outlook's security and privacy are tuned for those standards.
And just like Gmail, Outlook uses TLS encryption for email in transit. And data at rest is also encrypted.
As with most decisions in life, it depends.
Google Workspace is collaborative at its core, though its shared inbox and email automation options are more limited.
Microsoft Outlook is more robust in it's DNA overall, but can feel overly complex and lacking in modern design.
If your business prioritizes simplicity and collaboration with clients, team members, and vendors—I would err on the side of Gmail and Google Workspace.
If you work in a field with a lot of sensitive information (i.e. law, accounting, etc), then I would err on the side of Outlook and their very high standard for security controls.
Whether you choose Gmail or Outlook, there are some business email hygiene factors to follow:
Neither Outlook or Gmail was really designed for teams. They added on some lightweight features (shared mailboxes), but if you truly live in your inbox everyday, replying to clients, team members, and vendors—you'll want something designed specifically for team collaboration and shared inboxes.
That would be us—Missive!
Missive is an email client that sits on top of your chosen email service—whether that's Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, or Apple Mail.
It has all the features that are loved in Gmail and Outlook—labels, rules, snoozing, but supercharged with more functionality. Including AI powered rules that allow for auto-translation, auto-labeling, and so much more.
But don't just take our word for it, here's Arif, a lawyer and long time Outlook user, who recently signed up for Missive:
When I open Missive, I can hit Inbox Zero quickly. I never had that feeling with Outlook.
And here's Pat, a property manager and Gmail user, who recently signed up for Missive:
We’ve tried so many shared inbox solutions. Missive was unexpectedly powerful. Suddenly, we weren’t scrambling over lost emails or letting days slip by.
So whether you're Team Gmail for business or Team Outlook for business—you can try Missive today and get the best collaborative email client for businesses.
