Recently in Email Category

Our days are spent in a constant battle to empty our inbox. The state of our inbox is a barometer of how busy our day has been; we judge how much we've accomplished by the number of emails read, handled and deleted. Email isn't just for communication, it's our to-do list, our file cabinets, our lives. How many of us send ourselves emails as reminders or notes? After all, if it's not in Outlook, will we ever find it again? Will we remember?

According to the New York Times article, Meet the LIfe Hackers, (Oct. 16, 2006) some of the most prolific workers don't use complex technology to manage their days, but shove everything into one simple application. While some use a simple Word document as a brain dump, I daresay for most of us, that one application is our Outlook inbox and email folders. After all, as the article says, our inboxes are the one thing we're certain to look at all day long. And if we don't have an email reminder of a task, it may go by the wayside.

Perhaps that's why many of us use our inbox as a rough to-do list making the idea of an empty inbox a bit terrifying. But after reading Getting Things Done, a while back, I made the effort, creating folders for Actions, Waiting and Someday, as suggested. But I lapsed, backslided, whatever you want to call it. I'm afraid to remove things from my inbox, scared that once I put them there, I'll forget all about them. But after attending a session at the recent Joint Institute (SCALL, NOCALL, SANDALL) about the Getting Things Done philosophy, I'm trying again.

But the problem of putting a message into a folder and forgetting about it is a real one. So this time I've made some changes. I've created folders for current projects and tasks within my inbox. When I tried this before, I had one "Actions" folder. This time I'm creating subfolders to collect like tasks together, to be dealt with all at once when I have time. Any MCLE database updates go in one folder, Link Library edits/adds in another one. In order to to quickly determine, at a glance, how much is to be done in any of these areas, I've marked the emails as unread before moving them to these folders. As a result, the folder will be bolded, with a message count showing the number of unread emails that need to be addressed. This is working much better for me than one big "Actions" folder.

If you keep all your archives in your inbox, note that you can push the current actions folders to the top by simply putting an asterick in front of the name. I use this same technique in my pending projects folder to push the projects I'm actively working on to the top.

Here's proof that at one moment in time, I did, in fact, have an empty inbox:

I'll admit, though, it's not always that way, and it's not easy to keep my inbox clear. I blame Microsoft, as I do for so many ills of modern life. A simple change in Outlook would make moving important items to folders more do-able. You can set an alert on an email in your inbox, but alerts set on emails in folders, don't work. Why, oh why? It's critical to have a tickler on items in folders, which are not always in open view.

If you have any tips on how you manage your email, please share! I'm going to continue to try to fine tune and I'll let you know how things go. Managing email has become synonymous with managing our lives, and it simply must be mastered!!

I decided several months ago to turn off the Outlook desktop alert feature, and I'm glad I did. In Outlook 2003, the alerts pop up in the lower right-hand side of the screen each time an email arrives in your inbox, which for me was just about every 2 minutes. The brief interruption inevitably messed with my train of thought.

If you're a frequent user of web conferencing software, beware of the Outlook alert. I've been a participant in several web conferences lately where the presentation has been interrupted by an Outlook alert on the presenter's desktop, displaying text from a message that the the presenter would have most likely preferred to keep to him/herself. I won't name any names, but I've personally seen this happen twice in the last week.

You can be forgiven if you don't know how to turn off this email alert feature, which is turned on by default in Outlook 2003, as it's quite buried in the Outlook menus. Select "Tools - Options", then click on "Email Options", then "Advanced Options." and remove the checkmark next to "Display a New Desktop Alert."

So be kind to those who are sending you what they expect are private emails, and either exit out of Outlook before hosting a web conference, or turn the darn thing off forever.

Wouldn't you think that by this time email should be fairly straightforward? Sure the interfaces we use to access it are a bit different, but the basic function of sending and receiving email should be a no-brainer.

I guess not. After happily switching from Mailblocks to Gmail, I hit a snag; selected email messages were not making their way to me. Enough were being deposited in my inbox to give me a false sense of security, but somehow it seemed like the email I most wanted was rejected. Irate friends were [gasp] having to call me on the phone.

A variety of error messages were returned to the senders, sometimes after 24 hours had past, all of them indicating that gmail's network wasn't accessible. I contacted Gmail support, but never heard back.

So here's the thing. I like Gmail's threaded emails, the search engine is great, and the speed is quite nice. The price (free) is certainly right. But none of this means a thing if I can't get my email on a consistent basis. So back I go to PC Magazine's Editor's Choice, Yahoo Mail.

I've had a bad technology week. I'd better sacrifice something to the technology gods to get back into their good graces. Do you suppose an old Deskjet 932 would do the trick?

It's always a bit of a commitment to switch to a new email application or web service, and such a change will almost certainly come with some measure of inconvenience. So if you're considering making a switch, as I did recently, you might want to make sure you're making an informed decision by reading Web Mail: Fully Loaded from PC Magazine.

To cut to the chase, their editor's choice went to Yahoo! Mail, for all the right reasons. It includes an address book, calendar and notepad which can be synced to your desktop computer or PDA. Yahoo! Mail offers virus protection and spam filters. I've never tried the PhotoMail beta, which allows you to automatically insert thumbnails of your photos into your email, but that's almost enough to tear me away from Gmail, since I'm a dedicated Yahoo! Photos user.

Almost, but not quite. Though Gmail doesn't have all the features of Yahoo, it runs faster than Yahoo Mail, almost as fast an a desktop application. And after all, speed is of the utmost importance when using email. Then there's the fact that the banner ads on the free version of Yahoo are a little more than I can take.

Though I'll tell you a secret. I still use Yahoo for my address book because I can sync my contacts. Gmail's address book is just too primitive to be bothered with. Oh well, nothing is ever perfect! At least they're both free!

"Years" is an exageration, but not by much! Gmail has been in beta going on 15 months. I mentioned a while back that I was moving from Mailblocks to Gmail, and promised to let you know what I thought of it, so here goes.

Changing email programs isn't always easy. Because you use email day in and day out, a certain amount of muscle memory develops, and even if the new service/software is better, it takes some re-training. Switching to Gmail was a fairly easy change, as changes go, with a couple of things requiring some adjustment.

I should have paid better attention when AOL bought Mailblocks. I've been using Mailblocks for well over a year, and was really liking the clean interface and disposable email addresses, though I'd given up using their challenge-response system. (People just figured the challenge email was more spam, and almost never responded.) But for the last few months, I was getting annoyed about the space limit of 15 meg on my basic (paid) account, when Gmail was offering 2 gig, free of charge.

I also found it odd that no new features had been added to Mailblocks for some time. And I took note when Genie Tyburski reported the difficulty in getting technical support when she experienced blocking of email from Mailblocks by certain services, such as, ironically enough, AOL. But I was sending to AOL members just fine, so I wasn't concerned.

Duh. After all, what did I think AOL was going to do with a web email service? They're quite clear in the press release, which I probably should have read before now! They purchased Mailblocks to get their award-winning spam-battling technology for AOL members, which would not be me.

So when technical troubles hit Mailblocks last week, getting them fixed was probably a low priority for the folks at AOL. That's when I checked the web site and realized they weren't taking new customers, which I must say made me question their commitment to the original Mailblocks product. Oh well, obviously time for me to move on.

Okay then, I've been meaning to try Gmail for some time, now's my chance! I'll report on my impressions of Gmail soon.

I was feeling a tad stressed the other day. I'm sure you know the feeling. I was trying to keep up with all the emails coming my way, and also attempting to concentrate on a project that needed to be completed. Finally, I turned off the email notification feature in Outlook 2003, you know, the one that pops up the little message in the lower right-hand portion of the screen to let you know you have new mail. And I felt so much better for it.

Now come to find out that once I stopped monitoring my email in real time, my IQ probably went up 10 points! If you, too, suffer from info-mania, you might want to read this article from the San Francisco Chronicle, E-Mail Addles the Mind. (Thanks, Joan!)

Considering how much we use email to communicate, day in and day out, it would behove us to use it as effectively as possible, or we could spend our days doing nothing but reading and responding to email. I've read many articles on using email efficiently, but never found one that offered more than common sense advice.

That's why I really espcially enjoyed Tips for Mastering E-mail Overload by Steve Robbins.

He starts by noting that he receives over 100 REAL emails daily, and that "at three minutes apiece it will take five hours just to read and respond." But let's get real, I don't know about you, but if I spent 3 minutes per email, I'd never get anything done! Perhaps that's why email communication can be frustrating...people tend to skim, me included, sometimes completely missing the critical point.

I only recently realized how easy it is to edit existing email messages in Outlook. I guess I assumed that an email message was "locked down" somehow once it was sent. But that's not the case, so I often add a note to a saved email to remind me of an action I need to take, or a conversation that I had with the sender.

In Woody's Office Watch, Woody points out how to edit emails and how to tell when an email has been edited. See "Has an Outlook Message Been Edited?" in the Feb. 16th email with a follow-up today discussing the pitfalls of assuming that email messages can't be tampered with and changed.

According to Woody, "It's worth remembering that not only received items can usually be edited but the 'Sent Items' copy of message you send can be edited after sending. So it is possible for someone to change their record of an email that was sent."

We all know that there's an amazing amount of knowledge contained in simple email messages. As I've mentioned in several presentations, I often use Microsoft Exchange public folders to easily make such emails available to groups of users.

Public folders look just like your own email folders, but they can be shared with other individuals or groups. You can set security to limit access, or make them available to everyone on the network.

So how would you use public folders? If you have an internal email mailing list for the firm's reference librarians, there's likely valuable information being passed back and forth, so you might want to store all such emails for everyone's viewing pleasure. To do that you can easily set up a rule in Outlook to automatically move all messages sent to the list into their own public folder. Or perhaps you'd like to store selected emails on a topic in their own public folder by moving individual emails from your inbox to the folder. By making this information public, you may be able to avoid individuals having to store these items in their own, private folders. And you have searchable, though primitive, knowledgebase.

Taking time off from your email responsibilities can result in big problems down the road. Vacations, business travel, or just a trip across town can make it difficult to monitor your email inbox. Checking email on a regular basis when I'm away from my home computer is a necessity, or things will get out of hand very quickly. But how can you be two places at once? When it comes to email, it can be done!

Continued in [Managing Your Email Remotely, originally published in Searcher Magazine, June 2004]

Dan Brown writes an excellent article on Gmail's email management tools including, of course, searching, as well as threading, labels, filtering, and spam handling. After reading this article, I can see that I really NEED Gmail. Now if they'd only add a feature for POP email, I'd be good to go!

Gmail has been available on a limited release for 3 months now. If you're wondering what all the fuss is about you'll want to read Rich Wiggins' article in Searcher Magazine, GMail: Google Storms the Webmail Market. This is the most comprehensive and informative article on Gmail that I've seen, with comparisons to other web email services, a complete list of features, a discussion of Gmail's aversion to folders, and a review of privacy concerns, not to mention details on the flaws the privacy advocates haven't noticed that could open your Gmail email up to public scrutiny.

I recently wrote an article for Searcher Magazine called "Managing Your E-Mail Remotely - Advice on Maintaining Your E-Mail Relationship." (Sorry to say the full-text is not on the Information Today web site.)

In the article I discuss web-based email, as well as remote desktop access via tools such as GotomyPC.com. So I was particularly interested in a PC World article this month, "Access Your Desktop From Wherever You May Be" which describes how to use free tools to remotely connect to a computer at another location.

On April 1st, Google announced their free web-based email service called Gmail, currently in "preview release and limited test." An astounding 1 gigabyte of space is included as well as, what else, but a robust search engine designed to make archives and folders for organizing email, and for that matter, the act of deleting email, totally unnecessary. (Most free web-based email offers storage in the one-digit megabyte range.)

Incredulous industry watchers were uncertain....was this actually an April Fool's Day joke? It's been almost two months now, and I think it's safe to say that Gmail is no joke. But the hub-bub surrounding the product has been entertaining. If you haven't been following the Gmail controversy, let me summarize for you. Of course, it's all third-hand....I wasn't one of the select few who received and invitation to take Gmail for a spin. [sigh]

Considering how much we use email these days, it's particularly important that we use it effectively. So here's a tip that may save you some grief. The more people you copy on an email, the less likely you are to get a response. Not exactly intuitive, is it? Yet that's exactly what a recent CNET news article claims.

My quest to find the perfect spam solution continues. As I reported last week, I decided to try Spamex to solve my spam woes. I've since moved on to Mailblocks, and think that this may be the one for me.

Email’s reputation as an efficient tool for home and business communication is being questioned these days, mainly because the spam that is flowing into our inboxes is devouring our day. You can judge the state of email by scanning such article titles as “Can E-mail Survive?” (PC Magazine, Feb. 17, 2004, p. 65)

I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more! I've had it with spam. I shouldn't feel like I need a shower after going through my inbox.

So I'm preparing to take a momentous step, at least momentous for me. It's time to retire my Earthlink email address of many years and move on. But such a move needs careful consideration and strategizing, or, as we all know, I'll end up right back where I started from. So here's my plan, disposable email addresses, or DEAs as they're called.

Sometimes I wonder if my memory is worsening with age or whether it's just always been like that. Either way, there's no doubt I need all the help I can get.

So I've been on a quest to come up with a system to log conversations, events, meeting notes, etc. I'm still looking for the perfect solution, but in the meantime I've started using Outlook's Journal feature.