You could almost say it’s timeless

☜(ﾟヮﾟ☜)

Inbox zero doesn’t mean deleting all your emails lol. It just means getting them out of your inbox. I do this myself. For each email in my inbox I “do something” with it instead of just leaving it there. Put it in a folder, tag it, spam, delete, archive, anything. Personally I use 3 zones:

• inbox: currently to-do. Things I need to reply to or action I “flag” so they’re at the top. Everything else is moved either to
• archive: things I might need in the future. Any important correspondence. Bills. Etc. The important part is it is “out of sight”. I use labels to tag everything, I find this is easier to search and navigate. Plus if you put a label on the email, you know why you kept it, it forces you to quantify that reason.
• trash. Auto deleted after 30 days in case I change my mind and actually need it. Most emails go to trash. Aggressively unsubscribe from newsletters.

I have good news for you, you get to spend days learning an entire skillset to solve 1 specific problem!

In all seriousness though, there’s actually a big problem with email “quoting” as you say, that each email client will re create the entire email chain in it’s own format, leading to a complete mess.

If you still have access to that email client, it might be easier to see if there’s an export feature to export them as actual email files, which would be much easier to process than a word document.

Another option, if you are ok with “close enough” and some inaccuracies, you could ask an A.I. like Claude to process these files for you.

Otherwise you’re probably stuck with manual tedious processing. Personally I would just start again and ignore the file you have. Create an actual indexed word document with a table of contents so you can actually find anything. Add a header per email topic, with a sub header per message / reply. Manually copy paste, being careful not to include the quote this time.

Honestly I have no idea how all this works, it seems very confusing. But luckily I don’t need to understand it to use it lol. I just picked the Australia zone because I live there