Email is one of those things people don’t seem to do very well, at least the people I have had to support in companies and people in my family. I am only going to talk about a couple of issues in this story. I’ll cover others later. I am going to remain vague about specific examples, to protect the guilty.
- There is a lot of damn spam in the inbox.
You need to learn how to user filters, rules or whatever your service calls them. They are things you can setup so stuff automatically get filtered into a folder so you don’t have to do it manually. For instance, I get spam from places I like. Places like Target, Best Buy, Pintrest(oh wait I don’t like Pinterest), Kickstarter and other places like that. I get lots of emails. I put all of these types into a folder called marketing. Google also sorts these into a bucket/tab called promotions. I browse the once or twice a week and only check the top 50, then delete them every once and a while. Gmail also has a tab called social that filters the relentless stream of social updates out of my main inbox. You can setup filters to get those out of your inbox.
Here is also a caveat – KISS, I was working with a guy that had over 500 filters/Rules.
- Only use one inbox
Learn how to get all of your personal emails coming into one place. I am talking about things like school accounts, Yahoo, AOL(LOL if you have one of those, sadly I do too), Hotmail, and Google. Currently I have about 15 accounts coming into one gmail account. I think you can probably setup Yahoo and Microsoft(Hotmail) to handle all of your email in one accounts.
Here are some suggestions about services to use
Pros – Gmail is free and probably has the best spam/email separation in the business. 2-step authentication*.
Cons- they are reading your email to constantly inundate you with ads.
If you are anti-gmail, you may want to give Microsoft a try. They will even let you use your email address from some other service as your primary email. That is cool
Pros – It integrates with Microsoft Office and Xbox
Cons – it doesn’t filter as well as Google. Bing
Apple Mail
If you are an Apple products buyer, iPhone,iPad and MacBook. You may want to give apple’s email situation a try. They do some slick stuff, but I’ve never used their .mac accounts for email. I do however have an apple id.
Pros – it works great with all your iOS devices
Cons – you will have to pay a yearly fee.
Anyway . . . There are some other things you need to do with your email. That is your assignment for the week. Take a few moments to clean up your inbox.
*You need to be using two-step authentication, even if it might get annoying once every two or three months. Live with it!
This image kindly provided by http://epsos.de/