Cyber Drops

The large number of email that many users receive is a major problem for many organizations or individuals. What’s more email that hasn’t been effectively dealt with upon receipt is going to mount further and further up, and may be the cause of undue stress and hinder productivity. Below are some very simple yet effective tips to organize your emails:

Folders
Quite simply, set them up and use them. All material related to specific projects or clients should be stored together, including your replies. For instance if you have three clients, Power, Truant, and Max, then set up a folder for each of them.

Store replies in same folder
One can set up many email clients to store sent mail in the same folder that the reply came from. This ensures that if you are filing your incoming mail properly that your reply will be kept in an appropriate place too.

Brevity
Brevity is the first defense in the deluge of email that you receive, a quick message that can be used or deleted by just skimming the subject is far more efficient than forcing the recipient to actually open the email to read the message. Consider the following; a message entitled “leaving”, which could be a member of staff resigning, someone leaving the office now, or just their plans to go to the pub after work. The message body actually read:

I’m leaving at 5:30 and going to the pub. Coming?

So why bother with a message content at all? The following with (end of message) as a subject would provide the same message and save the recipient time by not needing to open it.

I’m leaving at 5:30 and going to the pub. Coming?

Keep an Empty Inbox
The easiest way to stay on top of email is to keep you inbox empty. Let’s assume you have a regime for dealing with email; now when the mail is read, you should try and deal with it immediately.

Email reading routine
Firstly you need to consider what your ‘real’ job is. It’s not likely to be master of email reading. So spending the day chained to the inbox is a bad thing. The ideal situation is you read you email regularly enough to have relevant information, but not so regularly that you are a slave to the inbox.

IMAP rather than POP
IMAP email has several advantages over POP. Firstly, it remains on your server, so as you move between computers your email follows you – all your email, and it’s stored in the correct folders.

Procmail and Filters
Procmail is a system that allows the server to automatically examine a message as it arrives on the file-system or is in your inbox and move it, forward it elsewhere, deletes it or alters it in some manner. Most email clients have additional filters that will perform a similar function, which you will have to use if you are still using a POP email account.

With an IMAP account procmail will perform the filtering for you, so as you download your mail, some of it will be pre-filtered for you, and be in the correct directories. The filtering could be for your mailing list, messages from certain individuals, or do some basic Spam filtering on messages.

Return to Inbox
You may like to consider to set your email “Return to the Inbox” rather than opening the next email.

Tools > Options > Select Return To Inbox from drop down.

This has the major benefit of leaving the unread settings intact and not opening Spam mail or mail with potential viruses or exploits.