Ten minutes a day for a month, front-loaded so the first week already feels different. This isn't a purge — deleting everything achieves nothing, because next week's mail arrives regardless. It's a migration: by day 30 your filter is trained, the worst senders are gone, and every new signup is on an address you can switch off, so the problem stops growing on its own.
Week 1 — Stop the bleeding
Day 1. Set up wherever your new addresses will live. Free and instant if you use a hosted alias service; a domain plus DNS if you want the addresses to be yours long-term. Every method compared
Day 2. Decide your naming convention and write it down. Company name is right for almost everyone. Five minutes now saves confusion at two hundred addresses. Conventions
Day 3. One rule from today: every new signup gets its own address. This is the only step that must be consistent. Everything else can slip.
Day 4. Turn off automatic remote images in your mail client so tracking pixels stop reporting. One setting. Why
Day 5. Train the filter. For ten minutes, use Report spam on everything unwanted rather than deleting it. Repeat daily from here — it's the highest-value habit in the plan.
Days 6–7. Unsubscribe from ten senders you recognise. Only ones you recognise. Use the header button in your client where it appears. When it works
Week 2 — Cut off the worst
Days 8–10. Ten more unsubscribes a day from recognised senders. Sort by sender to find the highest-volume ones first — a small number usually accounts for most of the noise.
Day 11. Block by domain, not address, for the persistent ones ignoring opt-outs. How
Day 12. Add your bank, employer and anything with security alerts to safe senders, so nothing important gets caught as you tighten things.
Days 13–14. Check your breach exposure once. Change any reused passwords it surfaces — this is the security half, and it matters more than the tidiness half. Reading the result
Week 3 — Migrate what matters
Don't attempt everything. Move the accounts that actually matter, roughly five a day.
Days 15–21. Work through: your bank, utilities, insurance, primary shopping accounts, subscriptions you pay for. For each, change the address on the account to its own alias and confirm the new one receives mail before moving on.
Leave the long tail alone. From here, migrate opportunistically — when a service emails you anyway, that's the moment to move it. Within a year everything that matters has moved, because the things that matter are the things that email you.
Week 4 — Make it stick
Days 22–24. Search your own name and see what's publicly listed. If people-search sites hold your address and relatives, that's a removal problem, not an email one. Whether you need a service
Day 25. If you registered a domain, confirm auto-renew is on and the card is current. Every address dies at once otherwise.
Day 26. Check the two circular dependencies: your registrar account and your alias service account should use your real address, not an address on the domain they control. Why
Days 27–29. Set up filters routing newsletter aliases into a reading folder, so they stop being interruptions.
Day 30. Review. Which aliases are receiving mail from someone other than the company you gave them to? Those companies passed you on. Disable, and note who they were.
What day 30 looks like
Your filter is properly trained and volume is visibly lower. The highest-volume offenders are unsubscribed or blocked. Important accounts sit on individual addresses. Every new signup from day 3 is attributable and revocable.
What hasn't happened: your original address leaving circulation. It's still out there and mail will still arrive at it. The difference is that the problem has stopped compounding, and each new instance is now solvable in one action instead of none.
More: the full guide · the checklist · the core routine