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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.
March 17, 2025
What Is the Best Email Client for Outlook? Our Top 6 Picks
Looking for the best email client for Outlook? We compare the top 6 Outlook alternatives based on collaboration, AI features, security, and pricing. Discover the best option for teams and individuals—whether you need shared inboxes, AI automation, or a unified email experience.
Email is the medium of business. It's how requests, deals, hires, are started and made.
Most businesses live in their inbox, whether they like it or not. And that inbox is likely an Outlook inbox — over 3.7 million companies use Microsoft Outlook for email management.
The are two main reasons for that:
However, like Word or Excel, Outlook was made mostly for enterprise solo use. It wasn't made for collaboration, even as the world of business and email moved towards needing more and more collaboration.
In 2025, several tools meet the security and control standards of Outlook while offering far more powerful inbox collaboration and coordination features suited for modern businesses.
We'll cover what to look for in an Outlook email client, introduce the six most popular third-party options, and break down their key differences.
All options have desktop and mobile email apps and support IMAP, MAPI, and POP3.
Plus, we'll cover a range of price points for the best Outlook alternatives—including ones that are free email clients.
Missive is a collaborative inbox for teams that run on email. This means it is designed with collaboration as a priority, featuring contextual in-email chat using @mentions—eliminating the need for forwarding.
You can assign or watch emails, and every action is logged—giving you visibility into emails and tracking who did what and when.
On top of that, Missive supports all email providers (Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, Apple Mail, etc) and you can have multiple accounts (personal and business).
Under the hood, Missive has a powerful automation engine, allowing you to do things like:
From a security perspective, Missive meets the same gold standard as Outlook. They have an SOC 2 Type II report, encryption of data at rest and in transit, and they are GDPR compliant.
For pricing, Missive plans start at $14/user/month on an annual plan.
One thing to note, if you use folders in Outlook, they are called labels in Missive.
In the same way that some teams prefer Google Docs to Word because of their collaboration functionality (commenting, multi-player drafting, etc) — you may prefer Missive as your email app to Outlook, if you find yourself hitting reply all and forward all the time.
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Thunderbird stands out as the only open-source email client.
It's a community-driven, free email client, that has been around for nearly two decades. With a thriving online community and an ecosystem of 1200+ add-ons (including AI-powered ones to help you draft replies), it's considered one of the best email apps for those prioritizing a free and open sourced solution.
If you're looking for an email client that has more collaboration functionality, Thunderbird's collaboration features come mostly from its third-party add-ons—things like mail merging and adding notes/comments to emails. Which makes collaboration possible, but likely a little unreliable given the nature of third-party connections failing from time to time.
From an organization perspective, Thunderbird calls their version of "folders", tags. Functionally, they are the same.
Thunderbird is a very privacy forward email app with built-in filters for phishing/spam and remote image blocking.
Though, it doesn't have the same compliance certifications (i.e. SOC or ISO) due to it's free and open-source nature.
Mailbird is for those of you who have way too many email accounts. It's known for it's unified inbox, where you're able to flow multiple accounts into the same consolidated inbox view.
Mailbird doesn't offer any features related to collaboration or coordination. It's more of a productivity improvement for Outlook power users who would like to integrate a few popular apps into their email workflow and see all emails in one place.
From an AI perspective, Mailbird offers simple AI drafting through ChatGPT.
Of all the Outlook alternatives on this list, Mailbird has the most similar user experience to Outlook—for example, their naming conversions are the same (folders are folders, and not labels or tags).
For security and compliance, Mailbird is only GDPR compliant and does not have any external audits or certifications.
For pricing, Mailbird has a free version as well as a premium version that's $4.99/user/month. There is also a pay once option to buy the product outright at $49.50 (standard) or $99.75 (premium).
If you manage multiple Outlook accounts and need a unified inbox for all your emails, Mailbird might be the perfect solution.
eM Client is a very similar email client to Mailbird. Most of their features are productivity focused for individuals—shortcuts, watch/snooze, configurable layout.
The most unique and powerful feature for eM Client is their search. Not only does the search cover all messages in your inbox, it can also search within certain types of attached files—think PDFs, Word docs, etc.
On the collaboration front, they don't have much beyond the ability to share folders (aka. labels), calendars, and accounts.
Like Mailbird, eM Client offers basic AI drafting to assist with typos and tone in your replies.
On security and compliance, eM Client is GDPR compliant (though possibly outdated with 2018 references) and does not have any external audits or certifications.
For pricing, eM Client has a sharp distinction between personal and business plans. There is a free plan for non-commercial use. The paid plans can be an annual subscription or a one-time payment.
The personal plan (without AI features) is $39.95/year or $49.95 as a one-time payment.
The business plan (with AI features) is $49.95/year or a one-time payment of $188.95.
Both one-time payment options do not include future feature updates. You can purchase lifetime upgrades separately at $90 per license.
If you're looking for a slightly more productive version of Outlook and you want a free email app because you're not using it for commercial purposes—then eM Client might be a good option.
If you're a Mac user and you really don't want to download another email client. Does the out-of-the-inbox (get it?) mail app from Apple work well for Outlook?
Well, compared to Thunderbird, Mailbird, and eM Client—Apple Mail isn't going to give you any increased functionality.
If you use Apple Mail as your Outlook email client, you won't have the integrated calendar or task management, and you'll have to remember that folders are "labels" in Apple Mail.
The good news is that Apple Mail can support multiple accounts from multiple providers (via IMAP and SMTP standards), so if you have a Gmail account and an Outlook account that you would like to unify into one very well designed, simple inbox—Apple Mail can do that.
If you want a free email client with a cleaner design than Outlook and don’t require advanced features, Apple Mail might be your best option.
When Superhuman first came out, it was solely focused on Gmail and Google email users. As of May 2022, they also support Outlook users.
From a user interface perspective, Superhuman is the most distinct of this list. It looks nothing like an Outlook inbox, so if familiarity is a requirement, this might not be a good fit.
Superhuman offers several AI-powered features, the most notable being its ability to answer questions about your inbox.
Instead of traditional search (even as powerful as eM Client's), you can ask your inbox direct questions. Instead of needing to remember a file's name to look for a specific piece of information, you could say: What was the price that John from ACME quoted me?
On the collaboration front, Superhuman offers the ability to @mention your colleagues through Team Comments.
From a security and compliance perspective, they are compliant with SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, CCPA, and GDPR.
For pricing, Superhuman is on the higher end of these email clients, starting at $25/user/month on an annual plan.
To summarize our options for the best email client for Outlook users, we sorted them into two categories:
We hope this has been a helpful overview of the types of email clients that are out there for Outlook users. If you're interested in Missive, continue on and we'll get into some tactical information.
Stephanie at Lighting Dynamics, manages 100+ email quotes a day. Her team used to use Outlook for email management:
With traditional Outlook forwarding, once an email was out of the shared inbox, there was no visibility. We never knew if it had been handled. It was chaotic.
And now, with Missive: "Missive checked all our boxes. It was a huge relief to see we could maintain the shared inbox model—without building custom software from scratch."
Or Kason, from i-SOLIDS, who grew his sales team beyond himself:
We got to a point where we weren't providing the same level of communication, response, and service that allowed us to get to this point. We were relying on Outlook email and it was like 'are you responding to that or am I?'
And after a month with Missive, Kason recommends: "Don't think about just choosing a tool for today but this tool needs to work for scale too—that's a major decision factor."
Get a detailed walk through of how to configure Outlook to Missive, including terminology differences to get you acclimated to your new inbox.
Well like most things, it depends. If you're a team who lives in their inbox day and day out, and you're looking a collaboration-first inbox—we hope you'll give Missive a try.
March 13, 2025
Autopilot for Your Inbox with AI Rules
Revolutionize your inbox with Missive's AI Rules, where artificial intelligence meets your workflow to automatically sort, respond, and organize emails based on what they actually contain.
We've all been there. You open your inbox on Monday morning and face an avalanche of messages. Some need immediate attention. Others could wait. Many should be handled by different team members. And a surprising number don't need any response at all. While Missive's rule engine has always given you the flexibility to automate your workflow exactly how you want it, today we're taking that customization power to a whole new level.
What if your inbox could sort itself? What if it could understand what each email is about and take the right action automatically—all while you maintain complete control over how it behaves? What if you could define exactly how your emails are processed, based not just on who sent them, but on what they actually contain?
Today, we're launching AI Rules in Missive - a simple way to bring the intelligence of AI to your email workflow without the complexity. It's the same flexible rule engine you love, now with the power to understand email content the way you do.
AI Rules are an extension of Missive's existing rules engine. If you've used rules before, you know they're powerful for automating repetitive tasks based on simple conditions like sender address or subject line keywords.
Now, we're adding the ability to use AI to understand what an email is actually about.
Here's how it works:
No training data. No complicated setup. Just plain language instructions that the AI follows.
Let's look at some practical ways teams are already using AI Rules during our beta:
- A ⛑️ customer service team set up a rule that using this prompt:
Is this customer angry or upset? Respond with ONLY "YES" or "NO".
If the AI says YES, the email gets flagged as high priority and assigned to a senior agent.
- A 📈 sales team created a rule with this prompt:
Is this a qualified sales lead or just a general inquiry? Respond with ONLY ONE of these exact words: "sales lead" or "general inquiry".
Leads go straight to the sales pipeline, while general questions route to the support team. Their sales reps now spend more time selling and less time triaging emails.
- A ⚖️ legal firm uses AI to detect if an email contains a deadline or time-sensitive request.
Does this email contain a deadline, due date, or time-sensitive request? Respond with ONLY "YES" or "NO".
If it does, it gets tagged "Urgent" and triggers a notification and creates tasks. They haven't missed a filing deadline since.
The best part? These teams didn't need to become AI experts. They just wrote simple instructions in plain English.
One of the most powerful features of AI Rules is the ability to use the same prompt across multiple rules. This lets you create sophisticated email triage systems without duplicating your AI analysis costs.
For example, you could recreate Gmail's smart categories with more flexibility and control.
First, create a prompt that categorizes emails:
Analyze this email and respond with EXACTLY ONE of these categories:
"SOCIAL" - for messages from social networks, dating sites, etc.
"PROMOTIONS" - for marketing emails, offers, discounts, newsletters
"UPDATES" - for notifications, confirmations, receipts, statements
Then create separate rules, all using this exact same prompt but with different matching conditions:
The beauty of this approach is that the AI only analyzes each email once, even though you have six different rules. The result is cached and reused across all rules, making this both efficient and cost-effective.
And unlike Gmail's fixed categories, you have complete control over:
This is just one example of how you can use AI Rules to create a customized workflow that fits exactly how you and your team want to work.
We've built four powerful AI capabilities into Missive:
As shown above, use AI to analyze email content and make decisions. The AI can detect sentiment, identify request types, or extract specific information that would be difficult to capture with traditional keyword rules.
For example: "Is this customer angry?" or "Does this email contain a deadline?"
Have the AI create a helpful note about an email. The AI can summarize long threads, extract key points, translate emails or provide context for your team.
e.g.
Translate the email to English.
Let the AI identify action items in emails and automatically create tasks. No more manually creating to-dos from your messages. For example:
Extract any tasks or action items from this email and create a task for each one.
Automatically create response drafts for common inquiries. The AI can craft a personalized reply based on the email content, which you can review and send with a click:
Create a helpful response to this customer inquiry about our pricing plans.
The above draft example could be paired with an AI condition that makes sure the email is about billing!
We've worked hard to make AI Rules approachable. You don't need to be a prompt engineer or AI expert to get value from day one. The system uses gpt-4o-mini, which offers an excellent balance of speed, cost-effectiveness, and quality for email processing.
We understand that email contains sensitive information. That's why:
For years, we've been building tools to help teams manage email more efficiently. Rules have always been at the heart of that mission - letting you automate the repetitive stuff so you can focus on the work that matters.
AI Rules take that automation to a new level. Now your inbox doesn't just sort emails based on simple patterns - it understands what they're about and what needs to happen next.
This isn't about replacing human judgment. It's about removing the tedious parts of email management so your team can focus on what humans do best: building relationships, solving complex problems, and delivering value to your customers.
AI Rules are available today for all Missive users on the Productive plan and above. Give them a try, and let us know what you think.
Your inbox will thank you.
Want to learn more about AI Rules? Check out these helpful resources:
