Recently, I have been having a push to get my email inboxes under control. After things have sat there for a while they tend to become clutter, reminders of things undone but not urgent enough to get done, so there is a certain logic to processing messages regularly and keeping the inbox clean.

I came across an interesting website this week, called 0Boxer. Its premise is to add game like mechanics to a Googlemail based inbox using an add-on (available for Firefox and certain other browsers). You get points for activities such as removing messages from the inbox and earn badges for certain achievements, like the first time you get down to inbox zero.

Is this a recommendation? Not really and I have uninstalled it already. One drawback is that the obvious way to make the most of the game is to get lots of emails. Perhaps I could turn off all the filters that immediately label and archive many of the incoming messages? Perhaps I could copy all those messages from the spam filter back into my inbox before zapping them? To “win” the game, I would have to lose sensible control of my inbox. Secondly, I’m a bit worried about the idea of having my address anywhere on the scoreboard. Since the game works with Googlemail accounts, it doesn’t take much to figure out that appending @gmail.com ought to yield a valid address and I am not convinced that I want to wander round in the net with a sign on my (virtual) back saying spam me.

So, nice idea but I’ll stick to the simple victory of a clean looking inbox and staying on top of things without a points-based system to motivate me.