DealingWithEmail

My achilles heal for the past several years has been email. I'm drowning in the damn stuff, even after the 500 spams I get daily (one the perils of having had the same email address for several years). Right now my inbox is at about 150, after an hour of purging.

David Allen (author of GettingThingsDone) has some things to say about email, but the best writeup I've seen of late is "The inbox makeover: Secrets of Mac superheroes", which clarifies and extends Allen's advice. (Don't be put off by the the "Mac superheroes" part, the article is safely generic.)

I fall down on the Triage part, letting my inbox get clogged past the point where I can quickly find everything that needs attention.

How do you cope?

DaveSmith 2005.05.13

Use a bayesian spam filter that gets most of the spam.
Use filters that move most of the important emails to folders related to the email (AYE, clients etc).
Don't use Outlook.
Use 1 account when I think SPAM is likely when I type in my email address. ([email protected]). Of course I consider email from earthlink spam ... I don't remember the last valid email I had in this account.
Use the delete key for the spam that does end up in my inbox.

DonGray 2005.05.15

That covers spam. How do you handle what's left?

Like Dave, I have had this email address for a long time and get what I thought was a lot of spam. 500 a week is not as bad as 500 a day. Eudora catches most of it and Norton Internet Security catches almost all the rest. Other than scanning the junk folder, I only deal with 1 or 2 a day.

I probably don't get as much real email as Dave does either. I was away for a week and got about 500 spam and 100 email. After I deleted the spam:

I deleted the out of date stuff - last week's meetings, etc. and anything I was not interested in.
I sent a couple of things to the client office to deal with there.
I deleted everything from recruiters unless I knew someone who would be interested. Those I sent, then deleted the email.
I acted on everything I could as I read it - stuff like the website updates, or things I could respond to. Then I deleted them or filed them.
I ignored one of the two newsgroups until the next day. I read the other, as it has less activity.
Anything with a link that sounded interesting, I opened the link. If it looked interesting, I saved it as a favourite and deleted or filed the email. Every few weeks, I go look at the favorites that have been added.
There are 13 emails in my inbox, starting with a movie recommendation from September (just out in DVD), followed by a software update I have to do someday, ...finishing with a meeting announcement for Wednesday night. It works for me. Maybe some of it will work for you.

No, I am not a J, just a P who tries to find a way to cope. SherryHeinze 2005.05.15

That covers spam. How do you handle what's left?

I generally reply to that email [as in singular not collective noun]. DonGray 2005.05.15

Updated: Sunday, May 15, 2005