The 2026 Backrooms film was the most accurate on-screen depiction of my email inbox I’ve ever seen

With the release of the Backrooms film in May 2026, it’s possible that even if you weren’t aware of the internet phenomenon before, you’ve heard something about it now. I’ll do my best not to spoil anything specific about the film, but some concepts will naturally be spoiled in this piece, so read with caution if you’re averse to spoilers in any way.

I posted on Mastodon and Bluesky the other day that I was finally approaching the overwhelming task of dealing with my email inboxes that have piled up over the years. I also posted about how my email was my own personal Backrooms. It started out as a joke, but as I’ve continued to work through my email history and dwell on the messages of the film, the more I realize it’s closer to truth than fiction.

Let’s set some basic context here. There are a few sure-fire physical manifestations of my mental state. One is the state of the interior of my car, and one is the state of my email. I have others, but these are two that stick out in my mind for being ends of the spectrum. My car represents the slow creep of mental clutter. I can clean it out fairly quickly and easily, and over time, almost imperceptibly, that clutter starts to build back up. I then look around a few months later to acknowledge how far things have gotten and know it’s time to reset.

My email inboxes represent the other end of that spectrum. It’s the part of me that I’m almost too afraid or embarrassed to acknowledge head-on. It’s the thing I don’t want to look directly at. It’s the thing I ignore, both because of the emails in the inbox and because of the incomprehensible state of the inbox itself. To call it digital “clutter” feels irresponsible and one level of understatement too far. The emails are unchecked, unorganized, flying in at a dizzying rate, and a symbol for the overwhelming hoarder’s pile of “stuff” I just haven’t wanted to dedicate real brain space to figuring out.

At risk of spoiling some concepts from Backrooms, that, in a sense, is what the Backrooms are. They are the spaces in our mind that we get lost in, filled with both the memories of things so mundane it feels trivial and the things that scare and overwhelm us. If not careful, they become the things we don’t want to look directly at due to the risk of being consumed by them. I’m editorializing a bit here, but that’s what I get from the film while watching it.

I started facing my email inboxes Sunday morning. It all began when I was perusing the offerings in SetApp, a subscription on macOS that provides access to a host of apps that themselves typically require subscriptions. If there are several apps within the service that you’d typically use and pay for, it can be a really useful subscription. Not sponsored in any way, just a quick plug for something I’d heard other macOS users mention and I found useful.

The app I found and tested Sunday was Spark Mail. As with many other apps these days, it advertises spiffy AI tools and a ton of other stuff that I admittedly don’t use. But its organization features and suite of tools for sorting through mail efficiently was quite the draw. I connected my three Gmail accounts and my iCloud account to it and let the hoard come through.

One of the Gmail accounts has been my primary for at least 15 years. The two others are almost that old, and while not as inundated as my primary account, had been particularly barraged over the years due to their specialized nature for existing and my not keeping up with them as closely. My iCloud account is one that I’ve tried to shift toward in recent years but kept reverting back to my primary Gmail, so it was filled with half-measures and spotted history of having accounts connected to it. The other thing with the iCloud email is that it receives the dozens and dozens of hide-my-email addresses that iCloud makes for me upon command. I can’t count the number of apps and marketing garbage I’ve been connected to through this feature.

I’ve done email “resets” in the past where I put a torch to the thing and just start over, but it’s been since before the start of COVID since I’d done any sort of extreme measure. So we’re talking six-plus years of unmoderated marketing email affliction across four inboxes.

Beginning this process was physically painful for me, as in I was mentally and emotionally uncomfortable for the first several hours. This was something I’d ushered into a mental corner for years and ignored. And I wasn’t just clicking “mark all as read” and send everything to the archive. No, I was committed to unsubscribing to all marketing emails, deleting unimportant things, and archiving things I needed to keep. I also didn’t want to just go out and get an automated tool to do this (transparently, I don’t know if those exist). I wanted and needed to truly face this thing.

Because of the sheer number of emails Spark was syncing, it wouldn’t display everything at once. I would see a number of emails, work for twenty minutes to whittle the number down only for it to refresh and show a number higher than the previous. It felt like the ever refreshing, expanding, changing, and enclosing Backrooms.

I had to see the results of years of knowingly and unknowingly signing up for marketing messaging. I had to see years of emails that I’d see and intentionally look past, letting them pile up and become a giant glob of digital stress. And as uncomfortable as it was, the untangling of that glob has ultimately felt good. By Monday night, I was wrapping up the journey. Over those two days, I put probably six hours of physically sorting, reviewing, deleting, and archiving.

This isn’t necessarily one of those calls from a “productivity expert” about achieving the holy grail of inbox zero or whatever. It’s more a reflection of looking into the face of something I’ve been putting off. Now my goal is to start the habit of managing that “thing” better moving forward. I’ve done this in a host of other areas in my life, so I know I can with this one as well.

If you have any email inbox tips and ways to keep it in check, let me know.