So much of my communication is done by e-mail that I spend a significant amount of time each day interacting with it. It is a wonderful tool, but when there are too many things coming into the inbox, it can become a burden just keeping the important items separated from the bulk mail. I found that I was spending a good deal of time on a regular basis just deleting unimportant things that I didn’t have time to read. It was time for a change.
I began by unsubscribing to lists that I had previously opted in to. You know the ones I am talking about. They seemed like a great idea at the time, and since then I have found myself mostly hitting the delete key without reading them because there’s no spare time and there are more important things to deal with. It only took a couple of seconds to select the “Unsubscribe” links at the bottom of these messages. Please make sure that these are ones you actually subscribed to as to not potentially let spammers know they have found a good address.
The next thing I did was to let anyone know who had sent personal mail to my WVU account to start sending to my personal account with an outside service provider. People were happy to update their address books and that quickly shifted their forwarded jokes of the day and “how have you been” messages to a more appropriate venue.
I also removed my WVU e-mail address from any businesses and vendors that were not tied in some way to my job. The notices of my phone bill being available were able to make it to my personal e-mail account just as well.
The results are far better than I had thought. There are fewer items coming in to handle, and more of the content showing up is related to work. In short, my mail has become more efficient and it has added a number of extra available minutes to my day because I am saving time in not having to grumble through deleting items or hunting for the important things.
What are your thoughts? Have you found any additional ways to keep your e-mail load more manageable?
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Another way to lessen your email coming to you, mainly SPAM, is to go to http://www.google.com and search for your email address. The more hits you have the more SPAM you will receive.
The best thing to do is get your email off those sites. If they are WVU sites, then there isn’t much you can do, since your email address is available to anyone who asks, but it still helps to get your email off of non-WVU sites.
Re: spam
Sometimes you have to have your email address posted on a website, but one thing you can do it change how it is written. If you change the reference to yourname[at]yourdomain[dot]com then real people can read it an understand that it is an email address, but spiders can comb through your code and grab it (at least as easily). You should also avoid using the mailto: tag to link to your email address. Sure it is one less click for readers, but it just makes it easier for spambots to find.
Re: email in general
You can also reduce your email load by using other tools like instant messaging or social networks (the virtual and/or the in-person kind) to communicate with people rather than email. I personally hate wasting an email on getting a quick piece of info or just to tell someone thanks. Sometimes a one-line IM or a phone call is a lot better.
@sarah
true this is the way it works i also made a png and jpg image strips with my e-mail written on it the other very good way is to put e-mails in [code] tag so its not scannable link on the page. i also recieve almost 5-6 mails per 30 minutes and sick of it but most of them are notifications requests and viseversa
I use a Blackberry, and generally want to have only important or personal messages downloaded to it. Since it draws only from my GroupWise inbox, I can control the flow of messages to the Blackberry by using rules in GroupWise to direct some incoming messages to other folders.
For example, messages from the work-related mailing lists that I subscribe to through GroupWise are easily distinguished by address information in the message and so can be moved by rule into folders devoted to those lists.
This doesn’t reduce the overall volume of mail coming to me but does make it more manageable.
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In addition, I use the GroupWise rules to presort much of my work e-mail into folders. That way, I can move from project to project systematically. My main e-mail box is also much less overwhelming.