I get tons of email, I've signed up for serveral survey sites and do things online all the time. Most of my family correspondence is through email and I do have a small home business. I am totally overwhelmed. I started out with a couple different email addresses for certian things. One for friends and family, work, things I sign up for online, etc..., but I;m not getting everything I should be done. Has anyone used one of those email services that sorts your email from different addresses and organizes it? I've seen a couple emailbundle and one email a day. Any feedback?
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Posted 1 year ago #
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Do you use Gmail? It will filter messages into folders (you can even color-code them!) for you. For mine, I've got it set to send NYTimes updates one place, stuff from my family another place, stuff from work another place, etc. Hardly anything goes to my inbox anymore.
I do have a completely separate e-mail for "spam" stuff, like when you have to give an e-mail to access a website, but I don't actually check it.
I know there's a way to push e-mails from your current addresses to Gmail, but I couldn't tell you how.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Thank for the tips, I do use gmail, but I'm not familiar with anything except the calender. Thanks I'll look into that.
Posted 1 year ago # -
here's a link to gmail's help for filters and labels to get you going: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=12881
basically, you set up filters to tell gmail which emails you want it to handle in a certain way. you can choose these based on the sender, which email of yours that they've sent it to, keywords in the subject line (like "newsletter"), etc. you can also look for info to have gmail check your pop email accounts - it's especially handy to adjust your settings so you can send emails from gmail that look like they've been sent by these accounts.
gmail doesn't actually use folders, but labels which look and act like folders - you only need to know that they call them labels so you can find them in the settings. if you spend a few minutes looking at the settings on your gmail page and the labs page too (the little flask between your user name and "settings") you'll find tons of ways to personalize gmail's processes. good luck!
Posted 1 year ago # -
One thing that really helped me was to stop using the web interface.
Get a program like Outlook, Thunderbird, etc. etc. and have all your email accounts dump into that one program. This reduced my stress of having to sign into a ton of different emails every day and made it easier to not miss things.
Next, filters filters filters, any email program will let you filter your incoming emails by any number of different things. For me I filter usually by who it comes from. So ads from Amazon go into their own folder, Stuff from mom and dad go into their own folder, etc. etc. This keeps my inbox from being flooded with various things (like surveys, ads, stuff like that) that I know will be arriving every day and can look at when I want to. This makes my main inbox feel less cluttered because it is only for "important stuff".
Next (yes there are a lot of things here) for my "working" inboxes, or basically inboxes that relate to work things where often I get tasks through email, things I need to do that are detailed by the email. I use categories. Basically everything that comes in has a blank category. If the email has important information I may need later it gets an "Information" category, if it isn't very important and does not detail a task it gets a "Done" category. If there is a task detailed in the email, or something that I need to do associated with the email, I leave it without a category. When that task is done that email gets labeled as "Done". The last part of this is to sort your email by category, that way your "Blank" emails, or emails that still need some form of action, sit right there at the top. This works really well with outlook because you can minimize the grouping of the other categories. So I minimize the "Done" category of my work email (about 5000) messages and it turns into one line that I can expand out if I need to.
Wow, I just typed a lot. If any of that sounds good, or if you have more questions, or if you would like to do some of it and don't know how just let me know.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Wow, this is a lot of help thanks for all the great insights. Sometimes all the email just becomes overwhelming and then I don't take care of it and of course it's worse the longer it goes.
Posted 1 year ago # -
No new advice from me -- just wanted to say I too use only one email program (Mac OS X's Mail.app, but Thunderbird would work similarly well for me) to check all my email addresses and my RSS feeds, and I also reevaluated my newsletters and unsubscribed from quite a few.
Apart from filtering the email subjects or senders, maybe the inbox zero idea could be something for you? It makes you process every incoming email and really lets you make quick decisions, not letting anything pile up:
* Email Zen: Clear Out Your Inbox on Zenhabits.net
* Inbox Master: Get all your inboxes to zero, and have fewer inboxes on Zenhabits.net
* Collection of original Inbox Zero Articles by Merlin Mann (there is also a link to the video of his talk)If the amount of email that has piled up really overwhelms you, you could also declare email bankruptcy and simply start from scratch :o)
Posted 1 year ago # -
just a personal comment, no advice here.
@trillie- I used Apple's mail.app for years until there was a huge snafu and I didn't receive any new mail from a certain email address for a week, and didn't notice. There was a very sick relative I was trying to keep tabs on, and a few bills that got screwed up somewhat. I don't recall if it was the apps problem or comcast, but now I'm paranoid and I just check manually. I did love that app though, easy peasy lemon squeezey. Gmail seems to do the trick for me as it imports other emails also.Posted 1 year ago #
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