

7 issues with email overload and ONE solution that gmail should do  - mulquem
http://mulqueeny.wordpress.com/2014/06/04/seven-email-problems-one-solution-i-think/

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normloman
If you're getting to many emails, the problem isn't your client. The problem
is your organization. Stop making yourself so available to everyone. Stop
insisting on being CC'ed on every discussion. Give employees autonomy so they
don't have to get your approval to do every damn thing. Stop being the point
of contact to every client. You don't have time to personally deal with
everyone.

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_mulder_
My suggestions would be:

1\. Seperate work and personal - There is no need to be receiving emails from
friends, Amazon or whoever when you're at work. Have a separate Inbox to
process these, they will be waiting for you when you chose to look at them,
not to distract you when replying to work emails.

2\. Unsubscribe from everything - When was the last time you looked at or read
a promotional email or weekly newsletter? If it wasn't recently (a month),
then unsubscribe.

3\. Manage your contacts - Do you need to be CC'd into every email? If you
don't want to receive so many emails from a colleague, just email politely and
say, due to the amount of emails you get, please don't CC me unless it's
vitally important. This may have the added benefit of drawing their attention
to what they're doing and make them reconsider who else they're CC'ing.

4\. Consider separate email accounts for separate purposes - Running a
businesses, a non-profit (as per OP) and you attend conferences alot? Why not
have four email accounts? That way you can separate each of your 2 'jobs' and
have one email for your personal friends and family, The Queen and Amazon. A
separate 'public profile' account can be used to field incoming requests for
help or advice or meet-ups from strangers or acquaintances that you may meet
at Conferences or on your blog. These are unlikely to be high-priority but you
can have a scan through at your leisure when you get the time without them
interrupting your normal work flow.

However, I can't help but feel sometimes, people who receive thousands of
emails it's because they actually like to receive thousands of emails because
it makes them feel and look more important and popular than they perhaps are.
How many of those email chains were actually started by you sending out emails
to other people? Or inviting people to contact you on websites or conferences?
We've all heard someone subtly boasting about coming back from holiday and
having x hundred emails. All they're really saying is "look how popular I am
and how much people need me". The irony of course is that, even with all of
those unanswered emails, it's amazing how things just kept working as normal.

~~~
JetSpiegel
Doesn't anyone does 4) ?

I mean, it's free. Sure, it requires a proper email client so that you don't
go insane with all the web interface nonsense.

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claar
I was drowning in email too not long ago, and decided I was tired of it. The
proposed solution in this article of having your mail client threaten you with
an ultimatum doesn't seem well thought out.

First, I unsubscribed to absolutely anything with a legitimate unsubscribe
link, instead of archiving/deleting it daily/weekly as I had before. Over
time, this made a dramatic difference in the amount of email I received each
day.

Second, though barely needed after #1, I use a couple of filters to get rid of
things I can't unsubscribe to for various reasons.

I now keep a near-zero-inbox, and find email to be much less of a burden to
manage.

~~~
cwyers
This is good advice. Hotmail (of all things) has a feature I wish Gmail would
implement, similar to the author's suggestion but I think far more useful --
for e-mail newsletters that you specify, it will only keep the most recent.

The other thing I would recommend is having separate accounts for work and
personal e-mail. I understand that for some people, there's a fair amount of
overlap. But even if you just use an alias for work e-mail and put it into a
folder in your regular inbox, that separation of concerns can make it a lot
less overwhelming.

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jrochkind1
I'm not really sure if this would be a good UX, but among other technical
challenges:

>Government departments and legal entities who communicate only through email
can override this, so the inbox owner knows that something has come from DVLA
(driving department) or HMRC (money department)

I can't think of any good (and realistic in the present environment) way to do
that. How is your email provider supposed to know what senders are authorized
"government departments and legal entities"? In a way that spammers (and
others who are offended by this UX) can't easily work around? And who's going
to decide what entities qualify anyway?

~~~
XorNot
If the government GPG signed their emails, then it would trivial and
notionally unfakeable.

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graeme
I highly recommend an assistant. It's not as expensive as you think. Just get
someone you trust.

I hired someone to filter my email for a start. They're putting it into three
areas: Fast response, eventual response, weekly report

It's made a pretty big difference so far. I'm working on creating procedures
that will let her figure out how I handle some of the routine stuff.

~~~
sunir
I would love to do this but I don't know how to start to make it effective.
How did you go about sourcing, hiring, organizing work for, and training your
assistant?

~~~
graeme
I originally went with someone on elance. She did well, but then did something
weird (deleted her work email account when she thought she had been hacked).
This made me not trust her.

I decided to go with someone I already knew. I know a bunch of people age
18-25 who are interested in picking up extra work. (I teach standardized
tests, that age group is my target market). I asked one I already knew and
trusted.

All around north america, college grads and students are looking for work and
work experience. If you can filter well, you can find excellent, affordable
workers. They'll move on eventually of course.

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amichal
My #1 wishlist item for Gmail: Group by Sender Domain.

\- When I have 5 outstanding emails from @client.com i need to reply baddly.
\- When i have 5 outstanding from @asdfsa.com with subjects like 'Buy Viagra'
its a good sign i should ban @asdfsa.com. - When i have 100 outstanding email
from @ec2-hosts.mycorp.com it probably means i need to fix some logging
somewhere.

~~~
sunir
You can create a filter for this in 30 seconds. Click the down arrow in the
search box. Type the domain in the from field. Click "Create filter from this
search". Label them. Done.

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thomaslangston
HA! No.

I unsubscribe from any email list that sends 2 useless emails.

I set email lists to the absolute lowest frequency and verbosity acceptable
(daily or monthly vs. immediate, summary only vs. full content).

I filter & archive anything that doesn't require a response (articles,
coupons), or that notifies me via other channels (social network
notifications).

I maintain a strict separation between work and personal email accounts.

I turn off email notifications and sync by default on my devices. I only
enable them when I expect to receive email that needs to be immediately
reacted to, and only for the correct accounts for the required time period.

I am available by text, IM, voice and video calls. I can be contacted for
immediate concerns quickly without email.

I only read email twice a day, at the beginning and at the end of the work
day.

I maintain a FAQ. I have answers to questions that I'm asked frequently on
file to copy/paste. I publicly publish these answers when possible.

I skim emails and respond immediately or flag them with a TODO. I prioritize
TODOs with a rough date (today, tomorrow, next week, next month) to respond. I
don't bother archiving unfiltered email because read, non-flagged is
effectively invisible to me.

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cr3ative
Wow, what a gigantic middle finger to people that try to communicate with you.
No, deleting your emails programatically because you haven't got around to
reading them is not a good idea. What about all the no-reply alert emails
you'll miss?

As for this: "Government departments and legal entities who communicate only
through email can override this" \- who decides this? The mail provider? Are
you trusting the sender to use that flag responsibly?

~~~
gte910h
>u. No, deleting your emails programatically because you haven't got around to
reading them is not a good idea

Archiving them is. You can't have more attention than you have. If people try
to get more attention then you can give, you have to triage. Backloads of
email are huge piles of stress, and you realistically will almost never get to
them

Once you've done the emails you've chosen to handle, use a mail client with
some form reply to process some things which that's amenable to handling, and
archive that which isn't important beyond that.

You should ALSO work directly to stop getting CCed on so many things and to
communicate with fewer exchanges on more important topics. Get co-workers to
not bury the lede, and to get items which need your decision or action to very
prominently feature that in the title and first line of the message.

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michaelmior
I've found Unroll.me[1] to be hugely helpful. There are a lot of mailing lists
for services I'm subscribed to that I'd still like to receive, but I don't
want them cluttering up my inbox. Unroll.me instead gives me a daily summary
of all these messages and gets them out of my inbox. (As a bonus, the messages
are still there, just auto-archived, so you can get to them if needed.)

No disclaimer, don't know anyone there or have any incentive to say nice
things other than that I enjoy the product.

[1] [https://unroll.me/](https://unroll.me/)

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mercer
I've been thinking of trying my hand at an app that is nothing more than a
thin layer on top of email. It would receive email, occasionally send email,
but not really do anything else with the user's actual email account.

I'm not very familiar with email other than as a user, so my question is: how
easy would this be? Ideally I want to avoid mucking about too much with the
email protocols or store a person's entire collection of emails...

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noddingham
I'm starting to wonder when people are going to stop trying to "fix" email.
Email is amazing at what it was designed to do and doesn't actually need
fixing. The way it is abused in your/my/most organizations would be (imo) a
better place to look for something to fix.

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skizm
Work your filters and stars. Also you should be aggressively marking things
spam/important as needed. Gmail gets smart pretty quickly. This might be tough
with a backlog but the filters can be applied retroactively.

~~~
_mulder_
This is very good advice. However, it would be great if Google could introduce
a time element to filters. i.e; 'apply label 'ToRead' if email is over 5 days
old and is unread and move to 'unread' folder'. Or 'mark message as 'priority'
if unread after 4 hours and from dave@important.com'

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rrggrr
Sanebox ( [https://www.sanebox.com/](https://www.sanebox.com/) ) and Google
apps scripting has me a near-zero inbox.

