How Full is Your Inbox?

[rogerd]

Engine's thread about an overload of valid e-mails brought my own pet peeve to the surface... My inbox folder has 1300 messages in it. Most of these are items that didn't merit immediate deletion, so I left them there to check out when I had time to kill. Clearly, I need to do some demolition work.

Time management consultants tell you to deal with items immediately - reply, file, act, delete... whatever, just don't look at it twice. I've clearly failed to implement this approach, judging by the sludge building up in my inbox.

My approach is more the septic tank approach - once in a while, you have to pump the darn thing out to make it work right. I've found that letting this stuff age has some benefits, as mass deletion becomes a lot easier when stuff is months old. I guess this is analogous to the "Aging" pile some managers use for paper documents - let stuff age, and if you haven't needed it after a month, toss it.

I suspect there are other festering inboxes out there. On the other hand, there are probably some really ambitious WebmasterWorld members who never shut their computer down unless their inbox is empty and spotless. (These same people probably exhibit other disturbing tendencies, like perfectly clean desks. :)) What does YOUR inbox look like?

[pmac]

Spotless.

Mailwasher cleans out the crap and I respond to to most email right away. I can't stand to have old stuff just sitting in it. My desk on the other hand.......

[Marketing Guy]

Hotmail only lets you have 1mb of emails anyway, so most stuff doesnt get in...... ;)

Scott

<joke>

[dvduval]

I usually get about 75 emails per day. It takes me about 3 minutes to delete the spam. I then go through the remainder and either answer them, or send them to my "temporary hold" folder. I also have a few folders labeled by subject for saving those emails that I might need later.

[bonanza]

I have more than 6000 emails in my inbox. I don't delete any email (except spam). I archive email older than 3 mo every 6 months or so.

My desk looks about the same, though I just did an "archive" of my desk into the trashcan.

So that's what my desk looks like! :)

[MikeMike]

Right now I have 5783 emails in my inbox. I keep the last 6 months of emails. This is after they are cleaned for spam. Otherwise it would have been around 33,000 emails.

It's getting out of hand. I am getting around 150 spam emails per day. I just started using McAffee's spamkiller sending out errors to all those emails. Does anyone know if this really help?

[rogerd]

Bonanza and MikeMike, I feel better already... Pmac was making me nervous... :)

MikeMike, I doubt if sending a bounce to the spammer will do any good. The return address might well be a forgery anyway, and spammers don't think about list cleaning and management in the same way as a serious direct marketer. I think the benefit is mostly psychological - by sending a bounce back to the spammer, you feel like you have struck one tiny blow against spam.

[Jon_King]

A mere 67.

[EliteWeb]

Are you talking about my webmasterworld inbox or my standard email? ;) My webmasterworld inbox has a few messages and my email has too many, i commonly trash normal mail without thinking twice its spam :D

[SuzyUK]

I trash daily too, but on checking I've got around 70 "folders" that have mails saved in them I must've had a good reason at the time

I have noticed an increasing use of the "find" feature lately though ;) so my filing couldn't have been up to much

Suzy

[kevinpate]

reads then rereads post 9 ... hmmm, I must be getting hungry, cause all I can think about is a certain oriental delicacy ... spam foo

[ggrot]

5818? I just archived and cleared out 2001 a few days ago though. I really don't sort my email except for spam/not spam. It just all sits in my inbox forever. Works for me.

[Josk]

All email is filtered for spam and then to the relevent mailbox. Where it then gets ignored. If someone asks I show them my empty inbox and tell them...

"Oh...your email must have been deleted as spam... Can you resend it?"

Unless people think its very important *they* then forget it...

[edit_g]

I actually keep my inbox very clean. In outlook, if I can't see everything in my inbox in the preview panel (15 emails) - I do a cleanout. This way I don't get left with things which should have been dealt with 6 months ago slipping further and further down. I complete tasks so that I can make more room in my inbox. ;) Once in a while (every day since the beginning of May anyhow - I've failed to keep to the 15 emails limit because I'm really bogged down and I look forward to deleting everything as I finish. May be a while yet.

The main reason I do this sits across from me - and it (he) has over 10,000 emails in his inbox. He can't delete them because: "there might be something important in there"...

[volatilegx]

I try not to delete email that isn't spam. I have a folder called "already read" for uncategorized email I have read, as well as about 13 other folders for mail that falls into categories. I still refer to email I received five or six years ago.

My email client is open all day and I check it about every 10 to 20 minutes. I get hundreds a day (mostly spam of course). My biggest problem is that filters don't work for me because some of my clients are in the adult industry and might use words you would ban in filters in their emails. I have become very adept at scanning subject lines to remove spam :)

[dcheney]

Generally I process inbound mail about the website into 3 piles. 1st is important people or easy fix (2 minutes or less) - those I try to do immediately. Next is silly/unrelated/etc type email (that my filters didn't catch) - they go in a folder never to be seen again. Last is the ones I need to look at but will take at least a few minutes - have hundreds of those stacked up at the moment :-)

[John_Caius]

Spam hint (recent threads on this topic after a BBC article highlighted the research):

Webcrawling spambots can't read webpage e-mail addresses of the form

a) username at domain dot com

or

b) your e-mail address coded in raw HTML character codes:

Just one example of the raw character codes table is at

www.bbsinc.com/symbol.html

[creative craig]

Around 600 in my inbox at the moment, needs abit of spring cleaning along with another 1,000 or so in various web based email systems :)

Craig

[trillianjedi]

username at domain dot com

How easy is it to build a script that parses that though? Pretty easy - I agree it seems to work at the moment, but I don't think it will last long.

What I would like to see is an e-mail system that works like this (let's say I have the address [e-mail]):-

1. Joe Schmuck sends an e-mail to [e-mail]

2. My e-mail client receives it into a holding area pending validation and sends an auto reply from "[e-mail]" (different to main addy so people I know can then always just block those from their inbox).

3. If the [e-mail] mail gets returned, the original mail never gets into my inbox.

4. If there's no return response within, say 10 minutes, it pops up in my inbox.

Does a system like that exist? Any thoughts?

The other thing I would like is some form of auto-spammer software for those Nigerian "URGENT: WIDOW NEEDS HELP GETTING $560,000,000 OUT OF ACCOUNT" type e-mails.

They tend to use Yahoo! etc mailboxes - I would love to spam them up to their full 3mb limit.

TJ

[caine]

103 in WebmasterWorld
the rest of my email accounts have hundreds and thousands, though i archive at the start of the month, anything that i may need later, and delete everything else.

[vitaplease]

13.435 at the moment.

I think one of the best reasons to buy a fast computer is:

1. Running your statistics program

2. Using "find" in MS-outlook (or-express) for old messages.

Now when is Google going to sell a cheap little box for full text indexing of my inbox?

[jpavery]

I have created a rule where anyone on my "known to me" list gets sent to my a1_inbox.

My inbox then gets filled with SPAM... however, my e-mail is published on the net and legit e-mails land in my inbox which need to be found.

JP

[dazz]

I keep mine very clean, attack them in the morning, usually about 50 valid emails (not spam). Then auto check every 10 mins thoughout the day.

This usually keeps everyting upto date. Mind you it takes a whole day to catch up after being on holiday!

[PatrickDeese]

if you use outlook (not express), you might want to look at cloudmark.com's Spam Net.

It has been consistently flagging about 95% of my spam correctly. The best thing about it is that any spam that it misses, you flag as spam, and it is added to their database, so other users don't get it.

I have been using the beta version almost a year. i had no idea how necessary it had become until they switched from the beta test to the paid version.

I got over 500 spams in 3 days, so I shelled out the monthly fee ($1.95).

Before using spam net, I was using eudora and using their filter system. however, I had used so many filters that it literally took more than 5 minutes for incoming mail to be scanned and show up in my inbox.

[Josk]

have a look at Mozilla's mail filtering. Quite good and knocks the spots off of Outlooks...

My opinion is anyone who complains of "information overload" either is lazy, or hasn't looked at their email clients filters properly. And now, since there are effective tools for filtering spam, anyone who see's spam must want it. Otherwise they would filter it...

[bunltd]

Hmm I have around 1200 in there, but haven't archived in quite some time... I have rules/folders for the important stuff - those get routed to the appropriate folder. The inbox is left with "new" stuff, newsletters and stuff that doesn't have a rule/folder. I tend to set up rules/folders for ongoing relationships - be they clients, groups I've joined, services etc. A quick glance can tell me what's going on.

LisaB

[makeupalley]

I'm using rogerd's system of file and forget.
1682 Items and 285 unread :)

Elky

[futuresky]

trillianjedi:

What I would like to see is an e-mail system that works like this (let's say I have the address [e-mail]):-

1. Joe Schmuck sends an e-mail to [e-mail]

2. My e-mail client receives it into a holding area pending validation and sends an auto reply from "[e-mail]" (different to main addy so people I know can then always just block those from their inbox).

3. If the [e-mail] mail gets returned, the original mail never gets into my inbox.

4. If there's no return response within, say 10 minutes, it pops up in my inbox.

Does a system like that exist? Any thoughts?

You MAY be able to set up a script like that in Pocomail. I've never had time to play around with the script possibilities, but it seems to have a powerful selection of commands which you put together to create your own "program". I've used Pocomail for about 2 years and very happy with it - far more secure than outlook and very easy to use. I'm thinking of moving over entirely to Linux (rather than windows) but the fact that Pocomail currently doesn't work with Linux is one of the major things that's making me think twice.

Up until recently I hadn't used many filters but my email got up to around 100 spams a day about a month ago and seemed to be around 200 spams a day the beginning of this month so my current "thing to do and in progress" at the moment is setting up filters doing other stuff to make sure spam gets limited to a minimum. In the last 18 hours, 58 emails got through to my inbox (of which only 3 were non-spam), a further 19 went straight to my junk mail box, and an unknown number probably just got deleted because I've set up some filters to just plain delete some stuff without me even seeing it.

I'm another who doesn't delete relevant emails (just get rid of the spam) so I've got an "old email" folder with 2475 read items in it, a normal "inbox" with 614 read items in it and a couple of small boxes with a total of 5 read items.

For stuff which needs action I just mark it for reply (or follow-up, or whatever). I can then view all the items which need reply with 2 mouse clicks. There are 16 items which I currently need to take some kind of action on.

[aeomac]

I had the same problmem my solution was to create a series of forms, and automatic replies that i directed people to automatically. I made it so people had to do some homework before they contacted me...
so far it has cleaned out my inbox somewhat, and made it easier to communicate - i dont ahve to do the first stages of who what why when.

[trillianjedi]

Futuresky:-

Thanks for that - I'll take a look at it over the weekend and see what I can make it do!

Josk:-

My opinion is anyone who complains of "information overload" either is lazy, or hasn't looked at their email clients filters properly. And now, since there are effective tools for filtering spam, anyone who see's spam must want it. Otherwise they would filter it...

Well, I don't want spam, and nor am I lazy, but I've had a look through Outlooks filters and I cannot find a way to safely remove spam without risking the loss of genuine email. How can a filter actually distinguish between the two?

If you have some good tips on filtering spam from e-mail - please start a thread on it - there's bound to be loads of people on here that could use that info.

Thanks,

TJ