Receiving 100s of emails daily can create a nightmare! If you are like me, you dread the menial task of deleting, sorting and handling of these emails.

For some time now, I have used a great system that combines the same principles the relate to physical mail.

Here are a few tips that will help you with an inbox that is out of control.

1. Make sure you have a good spam filter. Handling spam is an absolute time waster.
2. When you get email, try to handle it only once. If the request takes less than a minute for response, then it is the best practice to handle the request immediately. Revisiting emails that require minimal action causes that email to become an unnecessary time waster.
3. Microsoft Outlook provides a way to flag important emails with a color so you can go back to it. You may find that only a handful of a 1,000 emails really require this flag.
4. About once every 4 months, I clean out my inbox. I go back 30 days delete everything older. Voila! Now you have accomplished a great deal! If you have a good handle on steps 1, 2, and 3, then you have little concern about losing good emailsā€¦
5. At this stage, I can go through the last 30 days in a matter of minutes.
6. It is my practice to leave 6 months of deleted emails in my delete folder just in-case I lost something important or overlooked something.

These are my suggestions and they have worked well for me. Do you have any to add?

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 31st, 2010 at 12:41 am and is filed under Website Hosting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.