Email ninjitsu revealed
In my latest Guardian column, I disclose my five email power-tips -- the system I use to manage hundreds of emails every single day:
Sort your inbox by subjectLink
This is my favorite one by far. If something big is going on in the world, chances are lots of people are going to be emailing you about it, and they'll generally use pretty similar subject lines.When my daughter was born, the majority of congratulatory emails began with the word "Congratulations." When I'd asked my friends to help me find an office, most of the tips I got began with "office."
Best of all, if some spammer manages to get a few hundred copies of a message through my filter and into my inbox, they'll all have the same subject line, making them easy to bulk-select and delete.
Foreign-alphabet spam is also a doddle, since non-Roman characters will all alphabetise at the bottom or top of your inbox; if you don't read Cyrillic, Korean, Hebrew or Simplified Kanji, you can just delete them all with a couple of key presses.
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Ugh. This only words if you're starting with an empty inbox. What do you do if you're a non-deleter and your inbox has 7,000 messages in it?!
I see this system as a possible reward for getting rid of my non-deletion bad habits. It should ALL be sorted out of the inbox!
My real reason for commenting, however, is to express solidarity in the fight against foreign charset spam. I started getting this by the mille when I became a tech writer a couple of years ago; it's easily the most baffling spam I get.
@#1
I'll tell you the same thing I tell the people in my office who let their email pile up like that.
Keep storing all you mail in your inbox and eventually you'll lose it all and your problem will be solved.
Here's another tip that works great! You can use your mouse to highlight things by pressing the left mouse button and dragging it across text!
If only gmail let you sort by subject line... I've been using squirrelmail for years- a web-based client that I run on my own server. I haven't found a really good way to update procmail recipes with squirrelmail, so it's back to the bash shell to update those. I'm really suprised there is no mention of procmail/filters in the article in relation to mailing lists- keep the lists, just filter them out of your inbox.
You get spam in foreign alphabets? I'm so jealous!
Just to be correct, most spam you'll get in asian characters (as opposed to asian script) is in simplified chinese. Kanji refers to the Japanese variety.
Bet no one else here gets Malay spam.
How about using a client that lets you write rules? Create folders (or tags) and write rules to sort them. Hell, I had that going with Pine back in the day.
I know, it's far out, but just a thought.
There is a really good Google TechTalk done by Merlin Mann and his "Inbox Zero" e-mail handling process. I had actually just watched it a couple hours before seeing this post.
http://www.43folders.com/2007/07/25/merlins-inbox-zero-talk
He's able to add a little humour into the process as well.
More ways to reduce spam:
Sign up for a free yahoo or gmail account and use it specifically for web sites that require a valid email address to say, download a video driver, etc. Just check in once a week to keep it active.
If you maintain a firewall or spam filter and don't receive any legitimate mail from foreign domains, blacklist all foreign TLDs (.ru, .kr, etc.)
@#4...
Sarcasm, yes, but funny. Yeah, I thought most people throw mail they want to keep into "folders".
@#11
Most people who are good at quick categorization and prioritization (traits necessary for staying organized) probably do, but I am definitely not one of those people. Pair that deficiency (or personality quirk) with a penchant for keeping everything, and you have a disaster of an inbox on your hands.
I am, however, very good at highlighting text with my mouse...
that's the bummer about gmail, no sorting... seems like it would be so simple, but noooooo....
instead you get to create filters, and that's a pain. feh.
Is it possible to "Colour-code messages from known senders" in Gmail?
I've figured out how to do it in Thunderbird... basically you:
(1) Make a tag for known senders
(2) Go to Tools->Message Filters
(3) Hit "New..." to create a new message filter
(4) Create a rule where the "From" "is in my addressbook" and choose the correct addressbook, probably "Personal Address Book".
(5) Tell it to perform the action "tag message" with the tag that you set for known senders.
(6) Select the filter you just created, and hit "Run Now".
All the mail in your Inbox from known senders should be tagged!
@velocity girl #1: to start with an empty inbox, create a new folder called "pre-2008-04" and move all messages from the inbox into that.
Also handy for when you come back from a break...
Effectively, it's a softer version of "email bankruptcy": the mail is still there, in case you need to search through it, or if you want to go back to a particular correspondent, subject or thread, but it's out of the way and doesn't interfere with new stuff entering your inbox.
---> What free software do you use, Cory, for all this sorting and colourcoding?
Do you use webmail? Or something like Evolution or Thunderbird?
I just use Thunderbird, but I've used Mail.app and even Entourage with these tips in past.
#14, yeh, you can colour code senders and subjects in GMail.. and use filters to direct mail to various folders. it's just not a hassle at all, a couple of clicks and some typing in each instance. And conversations are grouped anyway, a feature which I've loved since moving to GMail.
Also, Gmail's spam blocker is second to none. I got maybe 5 or 10 spams in the first few months of them setting up shop, since then I NEVER get spam. EVER.
OTOH I was assigned an Outlook WebAccess account for work-related stuff, and it's the worst interface/spam-handler/intuitive program I've used in many years. In it I get TONS of spam. And the exchange server is set to deliver the spam anyway (just updated with marked subject line), so I have to delete them one-by-one anyway! CLEVER.
And if you use it in a non Windows environment you can't change the filter options. Meaning you can't filter spam (the 50% the exchange server catches anyway) if you are on Linux or OSX, thanks Microsoft!
#18, can you color code all senders from your contact list? It's a pain to create a filter for ALL of my contacts manually, and it requires quite a bit of maintenance when I get a new contact.
N, there are 12 colours, so I suppose I can actually colour-code 12 senders individually, or maybe 12 groups of multiple senders..
So, I suppose, if I can make my grouping efficient, and pertinant, yes. Realistically I just have some mailing-lists I'm on (using the yukky MajorDomo) and my girlfriend colour-coded. The rest of my mail is just random or noise that I haven't seen the need to label.
Also, re: the filtering, I personally just set filters as I need them. But you can do actions in gmail, like "filter messages like these" when you have a selection selected.
Or you can do custom filters using the following: From / To / Subject / Has The Words / Doesn't Have / Has Attachments.
From there you can tag, label, colour, forward to another address, delete..
It's probably not as uber functional as some progs, but I really like it for what I need it for.
A great feature is consolidation of all your addresses. Once you can prove you have access to an address, you can send from it - from within gmail, and because gmail supports forwarding, you can set up mulitple accounts for different things and have them filter/forward to your main address. So you only ever have to access one account, but can send from your work/friends/shopping/porn address.
@#13
I use Outlook for work and Gmail for personal email so I've used both folders and filters. They're really the same thing except for one fact - a single email can only go in one folder but it can fit into dozens of filters. If you create one folder for emails about chocolate and another folder for emails about peanut butter, under which folder do you file an email about peanut butter cups?
I love this article. I've been obsessing about email work flow for a long time.
I use the sort-by-subject first until I've slain those groupings, then I'll sort by sender and start from the bottom of the list and start replying. I find that one of the hardest parts of replying is having to constantly switch my voice depending on who I'm talking to. When I group by sender, I've minimized these switches of email voice.
Another tool I've adapted is a single button that puts the current piece of mail away into a folder labeled with the sender's name. I do it with a macro in Outlook, and I used to use manual filters in Eudora for the same thing. I miss Eudora :( I hope its move to Thunderbird regains manual filters.
I wrote up the Outlook macro here:
http://www.declan.net/2007/11/11/managing-email-in-outlook/
Of course, I've ended up with thousands of folders, but it really helped me find things. I am considering changing from being a "filer" to a "piler" since moving to gmail. The search capabilities make putting things in separate folders less necessary. In fact, even with Outlook, the desktop indexer is pretty fast.
D