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this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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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.
Text, as far as I know (?) doesn't take up that much space memory-wise, but on the other hand can you imagine the amount of server space that gets taken up by redundant text from people's emails (just for starters)?
Some of my approaches to the apparently much-hated "Inbox Zero" are to be diligent about emptying the trash, not keeping copies of emails in my sent folder, and most importantly, to download messages, personal or professional ones (mostly the former) that I find personally valuable, and then delete the original email so it isn't floating around forever in cyberspace. This leaves me with lots of txt files, which, as I said above, I then merge all together into one file and then edit. You'd think that there'd be a tool that cleans up the contents of email messages; there do appear to be some online ones, but I don't trust them. While researching this problem, I found out about "(g)awk" and am now fiddling around with it to see if I can successfully clean up my files without completely messing them up, as in
awk '!seen[$0]++' input.txt > output.txtmaking sure that I experiment on a duplicated file and not on the original. I barely know what I'm doing here, but I'll see what I can come up with . . .
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:
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