Comments on: How to handle Email Overload

By: Henry Lewkowicz

Henry Lewkowicz — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:08:10 +0000

Personally to effectively cope with the incoming streams of information including e-mail, I’m using my summarization application. At a click of a button I get to see the essential keywords and the most important sentences. Over period of time I found that looking at the instant information capsules gives me quite useful insight and saves me a lot of time. If you would like to try out summarization this is the product link: Context Organizer from Context Discovery Inc.

By: ankur

ankur — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 01:31:04 +0000

Few simple tips.
1. create rules.
2. have a good spam filter on server.
3. i now use mailinator.com for getting temp email addresses to register at any site.
4. try not setting up auto reply- it is one of the best ways to confirm that your email address is active to spammers.
5. For my yahoo email, i find that reporting spam emails ensure that i dont recieve much spam now, it was a big problem on it, owing to be a very old account.

By: Chris Grayson - GigantiCo

Chris Grayson - GigantiCo — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 06:29:12 +0000

Well, I’m glad I was able to be of assistance. I would like to reiterate, I did not sit down, dream all this up, and create all the filtering one afternoon. As a consultant, I deal with a lot of different clients, and I also use email to sign up for a lot of stuff. It occurred to me that signing up for things was a likely source of getting on spam lists, so I chose, a long time ago, not to use my regular account. When I needed a way to make client emails stand out, I began labeling them red. I had lots of notifications coming from things I had signed up for that were cluttering my inbox, so I decided that live music notifications should be one color, newsletters should be another, and art gallery openings should be another.

I noticed that most people that contact me through my website or blog were people seeking my expertise that wished to do business. Hey, that important, quick, backlight those in yellow like a highlighter marker.

And so on and so forth.

After doing this for several years, creating new filters as new situations came up, I eventually evolved a system that works pretty well for me.

In all fairness, all I’m doing is using the label, rule and filter features as they were intended by the software developers. Perhaps they do not do enough to educate their users on the features, because few seem to know they are there, or take the time to set them up (which are honestly quite easy).

I was visiting a client’s office just about 2 weeks ago, and a fellow started complaining about sifting through all him emails, afraid he would miss something important buried in all the clutter. He was on a Mac, and using the same Apple Mail app that I use. I saw that every email was just regular black text. I asked why he didn’t set up some rules and filters. He didn’t even know about the feature. When I showed him, and walked him through setting one up, he was blown away. I think it’s just an awareness thing.