Taming Email

Tips, Tricks and Essays on Email Overload and Taming the Beast that is Email

Do I Have New Mail? Do I Have New Mail? Do I …

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One of the common frustrations I hear from people regarding email is the
feeling of being not only swamped, but “at the mercy” of their inbox. When
email arrives they feel they have to act on it right away, regardless of
whatever they’re doing.

Factoring in the “New Mail” sound of many email programs, it becomes
Pavlovian – we hear the sound and like a well trained puppy we go check our
email, interrupting whatever we were doing.

Who’s controlling who? Or rather, what’s controlling you?

At a conference a couple of years ago, a good friend made a simple
suggestion had improved his productivity dramatically. You almost
could feel the productivity of the room increase as others implemented his
oh-so-simple suggestion.

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The Golden Rule

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As I’ve said before, and probably will say again, understanding how your email
client processes message rules and then using that feature is perhaps the
single most effective thing you can do to help get your email under control.
Rules really are that powerful.

So today I’m going to look at creating just one rule, the one rule I
consider to be the most important rule you can have. So important that I’ll
call it The Golden Rule.

The popular Golden Rule goes something like this: “Do unto others as you
would have them do unto you.” Our golden rule isn’t really all that different,
at least in intent. It’s more along the lines of “Prioritize the people you
know.”

If I could have only one message rule, this would be it.

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Rules to Live By

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If you get a lot of email, think about how you deal with it as you process
it. Chances are you see who it’s from, or who it’s too, or perhaps even what
it’s about, and based on that, you decide what to do with the email. You might
respond to it immediately if it’s from someone important. You might leave it
for later if it’s a subscription to an email newsletter. Heck, you might even
delete it if it’s from someone you never want to hear from again.

(I’m going to assume, for the moment, that your spam is taken care of
elsewhere. Obviously in most cases, deleting spam is probably a goodly portion
of what you’re doing too. Dealing with spam, however, is a topic for another
day.)

Wouldn’t it be nice if you had someone to sort your email for you? Show you
the email that’s most important to you first? Perhaps even collect all those
email newsletters for you to read and peruse later, when you had the time?
Perhaps even completely filter out the email that you simply don’t want to
see?

Well, you already have such an assistant.

Inbox Rules.

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Choosing an Email Program

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I spend a good portion of my life in Microsoft Outlook (2003, the most recent version). For various reasons, Outlook has become
my email program of choice since before it was even called Outlook. That’s not to say I haven’t looked at other email programs.
I keep a copy of Outlook Express ready for answering people’s questions. I have Mozilla Thunderbird installed for it’s newsgroup
reader, for the available email encryption add-on, and for it’s ability to just “suck up” email in raw, plain text. I even have
a copy of a non-GUI email program called Pine, and regularly use the the old Unix/Linux plain vanilla workhorse “mail”.

Apparently a lot of my life revolves around email.

Unless you’re a geek like me (and heaven help you if you are), you don’t need a long list of email programs. You probably just
need one. The right one, of course.

So which one do you need? And how do you choose from the tens or perhaps hundreds of other choices?

How do you choose what email program to use?

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Opting In, Opting Out

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As I reviewed the amount of email that I get, both in aggregate when I
looked at last year’s email, and just
in passing as I deal with my day-to-day email, it occurred to me that a lot of
the email I was getting was by choice, or by failing to make a choice when I
had the chance. Hence, I started making some different choices, and started
reducing the email I was getting.

In short, I asked the senders to stop.

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How Many More Email Addresses Do You Need?

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In How many email
addresses do you need? I advocated that you need at least three email
addresses. To review, I strongly recommend that you have:

  • A private address for people you trust and prioritize
    highly.
  • A public address for everyone else from whom you want to
    get email.
  • A throw-away address for one time, or occasional use that
    you ignore the rest of the time.

That’s a start. It’s a good start, and will go a long way to taming the
beast.

But it’s just a start. Especially if you get a lot of mail, you can do
better.

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It’s Time for a Road Map

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TamingEmail.com comes from a ton of ideas that are swirling around in my head having to do with managing email more effectively. As with so many things swirling around in my brain, it’s full of promise, but highly disorganized.

So here’s a brain-dump. An outline, a road map, a sense of direction. The topics concepts and ideas that TamingEmail.com is going to cover.

In other words, just where do I think I’m headed?

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How many email addresses do you need?

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If you answered “one”, I’m here to tell you you’re setting yourself up for a
lot of spam, viruses, abuse and who knows what else. Heck, if you answered
“two”, there’s still room for improvement.

Yes, I believe that anyone who uses email extensively (and who on the
internet doesn’t these days?) needs at least three separate email addresses.
Perhaps even three separate email accounts. Accounts and addresses are
most definitely not the same, and I’ll explain why that’s important in a
moment.

In my opinion, the days of using just a single email address are long past.
Fortunately ISPs are getting wise to this as well, and with the plethora of
free email services, it’s easy to have a virtually unlimited number of email
addresses. If you happen to own your own domain, then the possibilities are
virtually endless.

But why would you want more than one? And assuming you have more than one,
how should they best be set up?

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On Domains, Accounts and Addresses

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As I started to write some of the material destined for future articles here
on Taming Email, it became apparent to me
that I was making a lot of assumptions about how email is organized and
structured. In order to avoid losing folks from the very start, a few
definitions of some of the basic concepts of email might well be in order, both
for now, and for reference later.

Based on the kinds of questions I get out on Ask Leo!, it’s clear that the differences between
email domains, accounts and addresses is one area of common confusion. Since
I’ll be relying heavily on some of those differences as I lay out my
recommending “taming tricks”, it’s worth a few minutes to go over exactly what
those are.

A lot of people understand domains, but the difference between an email
address and an email account? Not so much.

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