Is your Email Running You?

Home Busi­ness Infor­ma­tion about Email

Did you know that there are more than 1.3 BILLION email users world­wide? More than one per­son in every five use email. Some esti­mates put the num­ber of emails sent daily to exceed 210 bil­lion. That’s two mil­lion emails sent every second.

Huh. It’s no won­der that some­times I feel like my inbox rules my day. How do you han­dle the email load in your home business?

The S.T.A.R. Method

I’m a nat­ural orga­nizer. A basic level of order is nec­es­sary or I don’t func­tion well. For instance, I just can’t han­dle a messy desk or a messy inbox, vir­tual or real. Man­ag­ing my inbox has been known to be the bane of my exis­tence. There is noth­ing intu­itive about man­ag­ing email, in my hum­ble opin­ion. I envy any­one who can read and delete. For me, I have to bring order to the email clutter.

Char­lie Gilkey of the Pro­duc­tive Flour­ish­ing web­site has a great email prod­uct, by the way. It’s called Email Triage and in it he teaches what he calls the S.T.A.R. method. Even if, like me, you are usu­ally good at man­ag­ing your email, Charlie’s prod­uct is worth the $10 invest­ment. (Nope, I am not an affil­i­ate — it’s just a solid prod­uct, IMO.)

I’m not going to steal Charlie’s thun­der and reveal his secrets. But I do want to talk about some of the tricks that I’ve learned to use that save me an amaz­ing amount of time. And also save my sanity.

Learn to Scan and Delete

Don’t read every email that comes into your inbox. Scan and Delete. There really is a rea­son every email has a mes­sage header that shows both who it’s from and a sub­ject line, as well as a mes­sage body, which has the actual con­tent. Think of it this way. When you pick up snail mail and bring it in the house, do you open every enve­lope or do you look at the out­side and toss some mail away unopened, based on who it’s from and what is clearly inside? I thought so. Email is the same.

If you find Scan and Delete dif­fi­cult because you see each mail mes­sage in full or as a pre­view, check the set­tings for your inbox. Look for a set­ting that gives you a list of emails. A peek inside is only going to draw you into read­ing the drat­ted thing, so change your set­tings to list only, no preview.

Rule out your Don’t Reply Messages

What? You didn’t know that there are email rules? Well, tech­ni­cally you are right. There are no rules for how to man­age your email. But a good email client will have a method of fil­ing incom­ing emails directly into a folder of your choice. This fea­ture is called Rules in Out­look, which is the email client (pro­gram) that I use most often in my home business.

The Rules fea­ture, or what­ever it’s called by your email client, is bril­liantly sim­ple. You define the rules, your email client applies your rules to each email before it reaches your inbox.

For exam­ple, I receive lit­er­ally hun­dreds of email newslet­ters. When I sub­scribe to and receive the first newslet­ter, I write a rule that says every time I receive an email with ‘Joesmo Newslet­ter’ in the sub­ject line, file it in the ‘Joesmo Newslet­ter folder — skip the inbox entirely, thank you very much’. And every time the newslet­ter comes to me, my email client files it before it reaches my inbox.

There is a poten­tial draw­back to this. If you actu­ally want to read that newslet­ter, you have to go check the folder where it’s been filed away. Since it skipped the inbox, you might not know when a ‘new’ newslet­ter arrives. (By the way, this is one rea­son RSS works so well for many peo­ple—RSS skips not only your inbox but your email entirely to com­pile your sub­scrip­tions in one place and let you choose when to read them.)

Seri­ously, do you think this home busi­ness infor­ma­tion guru is going to point out a prob­lem with­out a solu­tion? Have faith. Here are two sim­ple meth­ods to read your ‘Ruled’ and auto­mat­i­cally filed email when you want.

1. When you cre­ate fold­ers, make sure that you stay on the same ‘level’ as the inbox. Then your email client will show by bold title — and some­times by num­ber — each folder that has unread email. If you nest fold­ers two or three deep, this trick does not usu­ally work, so try the next option.
2. Use Search. Did you know that you can search your inbox? Most email clients allow search and with search comes advanced cri­te­ria. One of the cri­te­ria you can search on is whether an email mes­sage has been read or not.

So when you have a few min­utes to read non-​​essential emails, do a search on your entire inbox for unread mail and browse away. Once you’ve read the mail, click on the next mes­sage listed to remove the first mes­sage from your unread list.

It’s been read. It’s been filed. You touched the mes­sage once and every orga­niz­ing guru in the world will say this is the most effi­cient way to han­dle mail.

The bonus is that because it is stored in a folder man­aged by your email client, it remains editable as an email — you can delete, move, re-​​mark it as unread, reply…any nor­mal email action is avail­able to you.

Once you start prac­tic­ing Scan and Delete and learn to use Rules, you’ll find that a huge per­cent­age of your inbox mail gets filed auto­mat­i­cally for you. How­ever, some mes­sages will be one-​​offs — they won’t fit into a rule so you’ll have to man­u­ally file them.

Don’t Eat the Spam

Not long ago, I received 20 to 30 and some­times 50 emails a day that Out­look (my email client) iden­ti­fied as spam and deposited auto­mat­i­cally in the trash folder. You might think that let­ting the soft­ware bin these emails is the end of the story, but it’s not. I had to check that trash folder sev­eral times a day because in those 50 emails a day there were always sev­eral that I actu­ally did need to keep or respond to. So every day, I scanned. I moved. I deleted. And repeat.

Then I took a moment to look at the spam I was receiv­ing. Yes. I did. I looked at the spam. And I real­ized that most of the mes­sages dumped auto­mat­i­cally into the trash came from the same place. And it was a legit­i­mate (although using ques­tion­able mar­ket­ing) mar­keter. I unsubscribed.

Care to guess how many spam emails I get daily now? Less than 5.

Unsub­scrib­ing to spam has to be han­dled care­fully. Be sure that you’ve received repeat emails from the same source before you unsub­scribe. If you unsub­scribe to a trolling phisher, the slime will know that he’s hit on a real per­son. Those emails you delete with­out opening.

Why @?

By the way, ever won­dered why we use the @ sym­bol in email? Accord­ing to an inter­est­ing arti­cle on About​.com using @ as an abbre­vi­a­tion goes as far back as medieval monks. @ is short for “at”. Inter­net leg­end has it that it was cho­sen for the pur­pose of iden­ti­fy­ing a per­son “at” a computer.

Oh, another by the way. If you go dig­ging into the pref­er­ence for your email client and find out that you can’t use rules or search using robust cri­te­ria or any of the other cool tips I’ve men­tioned here…then it’s time to get a new email client. Sorry to be so blunt, but that’s the best piece of advice in this whole article.

Know any email trivia tid­bits? What email night­mares have you expe­ri­enced? Share in the com­ments below!