Kill The Messenger (Service)
Kill the Messenger is a relatively new service that is designed to help people reduce the amount of stress and anxiety in their lives by taking care of one of the most common sources of such negative emotions: email. Essentially, Kill the Messenger is a subscription-based service that sorts through a person's inbox and deletes all messages that are not important or urgent, thus leaving only the messages that truly matter and freeing up the person's time and mental energy.
The idea behind Kill the Messenger is not new, of course. There have been other services and applications that offer similar functionality, such as Unroll.me, SaneBox, and Mailstrom. However, Kill the Messenger sets itself apart from these competitors in a few key ways.
Firstly, Kill the Messenger is fully automated and requires no user intervention beyond the initial setup. Once a person subscribes to the service and grants it access to their email account (which can be done securely through OAuth), Kill the Messenger takes over and starts working in the background to sort through the person's inbox. There are no settings to tweak, no rules to configure, and no folders to create. The service simply does what it was designed to do without any extra effort required from the user.
Secondly, Kill the Messenger is designed to be more aggressive than its competitors when it comes to deleting messages. While other services may only archive emails or move them to a separate folder, Kill the Messenger actually deletes them from the person's inbox permanently. This may sound risky or even terrifying to some people, but the team at Kill the Messenger assures users that the service is smart enough to distinguish between important and unimportant messages, and that there are a number of safeguards in place to prevent any accidental deletions.
Thirdly, Kill the Messenger is positioned as a wellness product rather than a productivity tool. While other email management services may focus on helping people get through their inbox faster or more efficiently, Kill the Messenger emphasizes the mental health benefits of having a less cluttered inbox. The service's website describes email as "a black hole of stress and anxiety" that can lead to burnout, overwhelm, and even depression, and suggests that by reducing the amount of email a person has to deal with, Kill the Messenger can help them feel happier, more relaxed, and more focused.
So how does Kill the Messenger actually work in practice? To find out, I decided to sign up for the service and give it a spin with my personal Gmail account. Here's what I found.
Setting up Kill the Messenger was a breeze. I simply went to the service's website, clicked the "Get Started" button, and selected Gmail as the email provider I wanted to connect. From there, I was prompted to grant the service access to my Google account, which involved verifying my identity and authorizing Kill the Messenger to manage my email. This process took less than a minute and felt very secure.
Once I was connected, Kill the Messenger got to work right away. I could see a progress bar on the website that showed how many emails had been processed so far and how many were left. The service estimated that it would take about 30 minutes to go through my inbox, which seemed reasonable given that I had around 10,000 messages spread across multiple labels.
When the processing was complete, I received an email from Kill the Messenger letting me know that my inbox had been cleaned up. I logged into Gmail and was pleasantly surprised to see that indeed, many of my messages had disappeared. The service had sorted my inbox into three categories: Important, Unimportant, and Everything Else. The Important folder contained just 12 messages, all of which were recent and either from people I knew or from services I used regularly (such as my bank, my internet provider, and my dentist). The Unimportant folder contained 217 messages, most of which were newsletters, spam, or notifications from social media. And the Everything Else folder contained over 9,500 messages, all of which had been deleted.
I was initially a bit alarmed at the sheer number of messages that had been deleted, but I knew that I could still access them if needed by going to the "Trash" folder in Gmail. I also felt a sense of relief that my inbox was so much emptier and more manageable. I could see how Kill the Messenger could help reduce email-related stress and anxiety, since I no longer had to worry about sifting through thousands of messages to find the ones that really mattered.
Of course, there were some downsides to using Kill the Messenger. For one thing, the service is not free. While there is a 14-day free trial, after that the cost is $10 per month or $100 per year, which may be prohibitively expensive for some people. Additionally, as with any automation tool, there is a risk of false positives, where important messages get deleted by mistake. While the Kill the Messenger website assures users that such instances are rare, they do happen, and users should be prepared to check their Trash folder regularly to make sure nothing important has been deleted.
Overall, though, I think Kill the Messenger is a promising service for anyone who feels overwhelmed by their email inbox and wants to reclaim some mental bandwidth. The service is easy to set up and use, and it delivers on its promise of deleting unimportant messages to leave only the truly essential ones. While it may not be the right fit for everyone, it's definitely worth considering for those who are serious about improving their email management habits and reducing their email-related stress.