Project Inbox 2026
As I mentioned earlier in Finishing Things, my personal email inbox has become a source of frustration… and shame.
Rather than re-write it, I’ll just quote what I wrote about how this happened:
The thing is, once things turned hard, my the inbox collected a backlog for the first time in my life. And the more it backed up, the hard it became for me to face it. It snowballed. Eventually I found the whole thing so overwhelming that I stopped being able to dash off quick replies entirely. I haven’t responded to any personal email short of emergencies in about half a year.
Well, here it is, the Inbox of Treasure:
None of this is spam, newsletters, or billing notifications. I’ve already culled those. This is just heartfelt messages from amazing people.
And I was wrong about "half a year". Some of these messages date back to last August. That’s three quarters of a year. Yipe!
How does one measure a volume of email?
All of these are substantive messages, but they vary in length.
It would be interesting to know what the word-count is on all of these… Oh great, I’ve just nerd sniped (xkcd.com) myself. One moment, please…
Do you want web pages? Because that’s how you get web pages:
…Okay, I’m done. Are you ready? The total wordcount in my inbox is: 52,358 words.
No wonder I was a bit overwhelmed. That’s literally a book.
Anyway, the plan
I had planned to write two more articles before starting Project Inbox. But at the rate I’m getting those written, some of the messages in my inbox will be celebrating their first birthdays before I reply to them.
So I’m starting it now.
Again, quoting myself:
…I’m going to turn my inbox into a real project. I won’t work on anything else during that time. Just email. Until the inbox is empty. My thinking is that I just need to […] give myself permission to concentrate on just this one task. We’ll see if it works.
We’ll see how that goes. I’m thinking it will work. But what do I tell people when I respond to them after such a log hiatus?
I’ve been keeping this link around for just this moment:
Do not apologize for replying late to my email (ploum.net):
"Apologizing for taking time to reply to my email is awkward and makes me uncomfortable."
Noted! I would normally apologize because some of these messages date back to mid-2025 and I do feel bad about it. But I don’t want to compound the trouble by making people feel guilty about me feeling guilty.
Which reminds me, I found a few legit email messages in my IMAP Spam folder.
Unfortunately, that folder auto-clears after 30 days, so it’s possible I missed
some. I plan to update this page when I’m done with the initial inbox clearing.
If I haven’t replied to you at that point, I probably lost your email. Sorry!
Please re-send if you can.
Lastly, I’ve been toying with various options for a personal database of contacts and I think now would be the perfect time to make another go at it. I have existing notes here: Contacts - ideas and notes.
After the clearing, I intend to get back to my old long-standing habit of keeping up!
Wish me luck… Oh, and if you had ever been considering sending me email, go for it! The reply should come back sooner than 9 months from now.