Friday, June 15, 2007

Inundated with emails



I can identify with Debbie Weil's article that the secret to happiness is to delete all.

I have three email accounts. My personal email, my day job email, and my escort email. My email boxes are all overflowing, and I cannot delete my mail fast enough. As soon as I have deleted a batch of mail, my inbox is full again. It has got to the point where emails are bouncing back, and people are wondering why I am not responding.

I have friends who send me lots of jokes with huge attachments, that take a lot of space. I am a member of a number of forums and associations for the day job, and have lots of information sent daily. Once upon a time, I was on top of it all, but it feels like I am stuck now.

Whenever I get to work, or check my personal email it says that I am over my quota. I am trying to get into the habit of dedicating an hour a week to clear my box, but that does not seem to be enough.

If anyone has any solutions to this problem, I would be grateful. Unfortunately, I cannot delete everything, some stuff has to be kept. The hoarder in me will never die.

Have a good weekend.

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Comments:
I just love receiving lots and lots and lots of emails.

It's writing the replies I hate!

:)

B xx
 
Beau,

Thank you for your comments. I love receiving them too, however it now takes ages to read through everything.
 
I use one e-mail account, a gmail account with lots of storage space, as a holding cell for stuff I want to keep. That means my work e-mail can actually be completely emptied out (OK, not often, but it could happen). Besides that, and aggressive spam interdiction - in my line of work there is a hell of a lot of it, but I guess that's true for everyone - I don't think there's any great secret.
But quarantining things to save means making an active choice as to what to keep, which may help you in the pack rat aspect.
For what it is worth.
 
Anonymous,

Thank you for your advice. I wait for the day when I can empty out my work email.
 
I am with Beau on this. I like to receive...LOL
 
i have 3 e-mails to i check it every day i read them and only reply to the importent ones i don't read jokes and the stuff i have to keep i have a folder on my e-mails were i put them

i have a blog to check it out
www.amandasuesnews.blogspot.com
thanxs
 
There are email accounts with unlimited storage now that I tend to use to avoid the same problems. googlemail is one of them, i will check which of my other accounts are unlimited for you x
 
Jo,

Thank you for your comments. I know you are a receiver,lol.

Amanda and Caroline,

Thank you for stopping by.
 
Hello Nia,

Maybe you're not in the need for comments about this issue anymore, but just in case, here's what I recommend.

First of all, my favorite e-mail system is GMail, for its label and filters system. It is pretty easy to set up filters which allow you to have specific types of e-mails sent to appropriate folders.

When I set up my blog a few weeks ago, I set up the address provided to me by my publishing domain to forward to a GMail account. depending on tags, keywords, attachments, or origin of the e-mail I filter comments, requests, and simple contacts, as well as newsletters, and advertisements.

Also, I recommened GMail for their spam filter, which is incredibly efficient (though I wonder if, considering your business, it might not end up sending your clients' emails to the spam folder if they get to graphic in their requests... hmm.... no idea)


Another really simple trick online that too many people are not aware of is to use anonymous remailers or disposable emails.
have a look at:
mailinator.com
jetable.org
spamgourmet.com
and others...
I'd recommend to use those whenever you need to subscribe to a service where you won't hang around much (forums, blogs, promotional stuffs), so that your real addres doesn't end up receiving tons of spam.

Another thing I do, like I said above, is forwaring e-mails from an address to another. It's nothing related to privacy, but it's quite practical. Keep on address to forward everything to it, and never give it out to anyone.
Again GMail is great for this because it allows you to send e-mails as if you were writing from another of your accounts.
The great thing with this is, that if one of your address gets hacked, or you receive too much spam and decide to close it, then you still have all your e-mails backed up somewhere, and your contact list. (again, GMail automatically adds contacts to your contact list if you have somewhat frequent communication with them).


Finally, like you said in a more recent posts, well you just learn to discard what's irrelevant, especially business-like.


Of course never publish your e-mail "as is" online. obfuscate it with something like "my[dot]adressNOSPAM[at]NOSPAMdomain[dot]com". though lots of spambots can quite easily clean this mess.
The other problem with this, is that if your visitors are not really tech-savvy at all they won't figure it out either, as simple as it may be...
In which case you can have a small program recompose the address for them when clicking on the link, but that would need some more explaining here and that's already a big comment :-)


Additionally, if GMail's features are not enough, you can now use it over IMAP from Microsoft Outlook, and cutomize other filtering rules here, and also use somewhat "intelligent" filters (which actually try to figure out if your e-mails are gibberish or relevant, according to your habits). But that's way more tricky stuff already...


See you around

PS:
gee you've been busy writing for a while, and it is taking me some time to read it all... trying to catch up like I said.
but it's an enlightening read...

H.
 
Thanks for the info H.
 
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