Help! I am Drowning in Email

Its taking too much of my day!

[King_Fisher]

I need some ideas on managing my emails.

When I log on in the AM. I have anywhere from 100 to 200 emails. Some are orders, some are ads, some WWW posts, personal mail, etc,etc.

It takes about an hour and a half to read, delete or save. Before long its noon
and I have spent all morning on this.

I need to bring this under control. Any one have any good ideas?...KF

[LifeinAsia]

Prioritize! (Read mine first. :) )

Your e-mail client should have a function to automatically sort incoming mail into folders based on e-mail address, subject, and other filters. (If not, dump it and get another one that does.) You can do a lot of automatic sorting this way to help you organize things by priorities.

Also, I've found that having different e-mail addresses for business and personal really helps.

[King_Fisher]

LIA, Thanks! Your advice is so thorough I dont think any one could add to it.

Especially liked the folders and the two e/mail addresses bit. This should help.

...KF (Will definitely always read your post first!) :-)

[lawman]

SpamBayes

[HelenDev]

The folders thing can be useful, but I find it too easy to ignore important emails if they go straight off into a subfolder somewhere.

I'm pretty sure you can turn off the notifications from WW and other sites! Then simply log into WW and check your messages and updated threads from the control panel.

I find the best plan of action is to limit the amount of time spent dealing with emails, otherwise you could easily spend all day every day on it. Set aside the morning for checking and sorting emails, and then the afternoon for doing something else.

I personally don't like to keep anything in my inbox after it's been dealt with, so I generally have a reasonably clear inbox which is good for my sanity.

[HarryM]

I use Outlook Express and use message rules with folders set up as "inboxes". These inbox folder names start with a # so they are displayed alphabetically at the top of the Local Folders list. New emails always show up in bold as unread. When I have read the emails I delete them or move them to an archive folder.

It still takes a lot of time though. :(

[LifeinAsia]

Actually, if you REALLY want to cut down on the amount of time you spend on reading e-mail, change your e-mail address and don't tell anyone. Since you know that any e-mail sent to the new address will be SPAM that somehoe found that address, you can setup a rule to automatically forward all messages to the wastebaket.

Now, are you SURE you want to always read my messages and take my advice first? :)

[buckworks]

I found that the problem improved when I got serious about trying to follow the "OHIO Rule":

Only Handle It Once

[4crests]

Be careful with the multiple email route. If you don't manage it carefully you will end up with people emailing ALL your email addresses, thinking you will answer quicker. I tried this on my ecommerce site. I had separate emails for PRODUCT QUESTIONS, another for ORDER STATUS, etc. etc. It ended up a nightmare. A large portion of the people will email ALL the addresses.

But definitely, you do want to have a separate email for personal emails and business emails. Just don't give out your personal one to anyone but friends, family, etc.

On my next try, I am going to hire someone to build some kind of email form integrated into my website where they select what their email is about from a pulldown menu. Then the email is forwarded to my appropriate email address. I suppose they can still send multiples by choosing multiple reasons, but I think it will help me a lot. Worth a try at least.