Organising your Emails?

[Flyingpony]

Like many people I've trouble with sorting my emails. Certain types of emails are easy to handle, such as junk and mailing lists, filters take care of those. It's all the other emails which cause the problems. I've not found a single simple method to handle all of them. Obviously while they've active, inbox is fine but what happens afterwards? Trash bin

Have tried the sort away according to project, sender, monthly date, and a few others. But nothing has been fool proof. The only method which works really well is "don't check your email"

Right now, my half-baked system is as follows:
- As long as it's something active, it's stays in the inbox. Once the topic is finished, it gets deleted along with the sent items. Should it be important to keep, then the inbox items are placed in senders sub-folder and sent items in a sub-folder beneath that - this approach is still not right.
- All sub-folders are placed beneath a 'year' folder, so they get frozen when a new year starts and thus can be moved onto CD
- Junk email is shift-deleted.
- FYI/Tips are stored according to who was the original sender - encase there are multiple, simply keep the latest incarnation.
- Mailing lists and notification emails are picked up by filter and dealt with accordingly.
- And don't empty the email trash bin either for obvious reasons

There's got to be a better way, can you share with us yours please

P.S. Which email client are you using?
I'm a black sheep using Thunderbird but will probably be forced shortly to use M$ Outlook

[kiwifruit]

gmail
never delete an email again!
www.gmail.google.com/

[Cajun]

outlook 2003 for work
thunderbird handles my 6 personal accounts,

Everything split in to folders, once jobs are completed.

[Wasp]

all in one big messy sticky pile.... which i hope i never have to clean up

[Flyingpony]

Everything split in to folders, once jobs are completed.

Can you elaborate a bit more as to how the folders are setup?
Are they by sender, project, time?
Thanks.

[phantom]

I work for an IT company and my boss just leaves evrything in his inbox, i.e. no subfolders, no sorting, nothing. There's years and years of emails there and what do you know he can't find anything.

[Finn]

What you've just described is the biggest problem facing people and organisations today. We are simply swamped with information varying in formats both structured and unstructured. The IT industry has done a huge disservice to us but we happily keep giving them money, yet rarely yield any real advantage.

We are all burdened by multiple, disparate information silos that don't communicate, let alone share information. At one end of the scale, people struggle to find information on personal computers. At the other end, large businesses are crippled by poorly design information management systems. Take Telecom for example. You may have a home line, internet and a mobile phone but they have absolutely no visibility of you as a customer. They spend millions on call centres that can't answer simple questions and it becomes so difficult that they outsource it.

Email and email software provides a delivery vehicle and as such is not an information management system. Even the best of products such as Outlook has very limited management functionality.

[Ixion]

I do exactly the same. And I can find things real easy. Search is your friend.

[skelstar]

Thunderbird. Love it. Lots of 'extensions' as well but havent had the time to figure out what they can do for me.

[Drunken Monkey]

Finn,

First you blame the IT industry, then you blame business processes. Which is it? Or is it both?

The problem with managing Email & Email systems, IMHO, is it has vastly outgrown it's original intention (plain text memos), it's been band-aided and jury-rigged, with the addition of active coding and attachments, to a point where it can be a mess if people don't know what they're dealing with (which is most people, due to a lack of training and adequate business processes!)

FP, if it's work Email then maybe you could sort out a process that everyone in your office can adopt. If it's your personal Email, then do whatever works for you. Personally, I ditch attachments (save them out or delete as appropriate), then just shove all my email into .pst files every few months or so. At work, we just dump all messages relevant to each customer in the customer's folder and do flat text searches when we need to check something.

[Drunken Monkey]

- And don't empty the email trash bin either for obvious reasons

Please don't FILE important messages in TRASH (that's why it's called TRASH!!!!!) It's the first place the IT staff will, without any warning, remove messages from permanently if there are ever disk space/DB size issues on a mail server.

[Finn]

Finn,

First you blame the IT industry, then you blame business processes. Which is it? Or is it both?

The problem with managing Email & Email systems, IMHO, is it has vastly outgrown it's original intention (plain text memos), it's been band-aided and jury-rigged, with the addition of active coding and attachments, to a point where it can be a mess if people don't know what they're dealing with (which is most people, due to a lack of training and adequate business processes!)

Good question. The fault is with both. Many of the challenges facing businesses today are forcing organisations to make changes for which they have no existing delivery mechanism. Technology by itself is not the answer yet we keep throwing money at it expecting our problems to go away. They don't.

If you look at any business today, there are 4 facits; People, Systems, Processes & Strategy. If you think of one complete, end to end process such as an insurance claim, it will span mutliple IT systems. Because these systems aren't fused, the result is fragmented processes. We handle this by throwing people at processes. So when we talk about processes, they are typically outside of systems and manged by people hence why we don't have visibility and no real time reporting. Chuck paper into the equation (as almost all businesses are paper dependant) and you can't manage shit.

Also, don't confuse process with actions. There are differant. An action is to store an email. A process manages the context of an email and manages it through a defined series of events with an outcome that is managed and monitored.

[Cajun]

Can you elaborate a bit more as to how the folders are setup?
Are they by sender, project, time?
Thanks.

Work -
EDI - then 10 different sub groups dealing with each customer
Outsource - 4 sub folders with emails with each out source company we deal with
Personal - two sub folders under this
Other Jobs - which has about 6 different sub folders, dealing with two other sections i deal with(all emails in this are internal emails) then also 2 others which are sub business which my work has 50% stake in, and i do IT work for them time to time)

Personal -
Motorbike
Passwords/Websites - 5 sub sections dealing with different forums types i belong to eg bike, computer,
Ebay/Trade me - Sub folders for each of these and also completed for each, and also a paypal recietp section for ebay and other items purchased
Computer orders - folder dealing with invoices for buying computer parts for friends, family, customers.
Family/Friends - emails from friends and family with sub folders for friends and family split of

[Steam]

Just leave all your emails unsorted, use their 2.5 gigs of free storage, they have upload-all tools, and you can google-search all your email. It totally rocks.
If anyone wants an account, PM me your current email address, and I'll send you an invite.

[Cajun]

personally i am not a big fan of webbased mail, but i also have a laptop which i carry with me, which has my work email and personal email all on one which is handy.