I was surprised to see that no one has yet written about what we talked in the lecture about strategies for handling electronic mail. Since I didn't come up with any better ideas, I thought to write about how I deal with all of my e-mail accounts and inboxes.
I use Mozilla Thunderbird to read my uta mail, which is my main mail account. Since Thunderbird is always open at my laptop, I usually read my e-mails right when I get them. In addition to uta mail, I have numerous other mail accounts: two gmail accounts (with my real name and alias), one jippii mail account for unofficial stuff and few that I only use in special occasions. When I was working I had also a work e-mail account.
At the moment my uta mail inbox has over 700 messages and few specific university related folders have 950 and 200 mails. As you can guess, my mail box strategy is somewhere between "No filers" and "Spring cleaners". During my studies I have never cleaned my inbox completely. I've only removed big attachments and other messages that take space too much. I try to delete messages when they arrive if I do not need them. However there's no doubt that I'm facing a huge cleaning in the near future.
My main problem with keeping my mailbox clean is that I never know what message I'll need and then I decide not to delete if I'm not sure. I also tend to keep messages that contain important attachments because I don't trust that my computer doesn't break. I practically save important files in my mail, because it's available from all computers. I sometimes even send myself mail that contains a file that I want to save. I've never lost anything important because of computer crash, but I'm terrified that it will happen to me sometimes, even though I save the most important information on hard disks and dvd's.
Here are "Ten quick tips to save time and effort with e-mail". Here are the main steps shortly:
Tip #1: Budget e-mail time
Tip #2: Read Once and Decide
Tip #3: Use Folders, Not the Inbox
Tip #4: Unsubscribe, or Just Don't Subscribe
Tip #5: Report Spam
Tip #6: Use Sorting Techniques
Tip #7: Use Mailing Lists
Tip #8: Keep Contact Information Current
Tip #9: E-mail Time Can be Multitask Time
Tip #10: Consolidate e-mails into files
Other interesting article is "My e-mail management strategy".
Do you have any other tips that could help my e-mail chaos? ;)
I didn't know that Gmail has that many features. Once I got my uta mail I always use it and only created gmail account(s) because I needed to sign in to Google services. But even today I hardly ever log into my gmail, that's the reason I didn't notice I had had an invitation to write in this blog at the beginning of the course :)