Email: a wonderful new technology with the potential for taking over
your life. Over time I have evolved various strategies for dealing with
the ever-increasing flood of email, and I offer some ideas here in
hopes that they may be helpful to others.
First off, I decided early on to get several email accounts, so
besides my regular ISP email address, I have some other accounts at
free online services. I use these when I'm dealing with online
businesses, especially when signing up to receive newsletters and the
like. My original idea with this was to minimize spam - or at least
concentrate it in certain mailboxes that were not my "personal" email
and could be filtered to reject unwanted content.
As a new Mac user, I hadn't yet figured out Hotmail was run by The
Dark Side, so I got a Hotmail address, among others. I found the
filtering concept didn't work as well as I'd hoped. Hotmail, for
instance, allows each user 250 blocked addresses and 36 filters. I soon
had the blocked addresses full and all the filters in use ("If message
subject contains 'viagra,' deliver to Trash Can.") Vast amounts of
obnoxious spam still made its way to my account.
I started reporting spammers to their ISPs in my spare time. Of
course, no one has enough spare time to really make a dent in this
stuff. Particularly unsettling is the recent trend in spam which
invites me to become a spammer myself ("Your message delivered to 10
million addresses!"). No wonder we can't keep up.
Just when I was ready to give up on my Hotmail account, Hotmail
offered an increased level of spam filtering and instant emptying of
the Junk Mail folder. I took those options and have seen hardly any
spam in that account the last few weeks. If I'm losing any "real" email
to those filters, chances are it wasn't important anyway.
Meantime, an advantage of using online email for company newsletters
is that many of the newsletters do not have an option of plain text. I
dislike HTML email, and one of my pet peeves is the tendency of our
computers to automatically dial in to the Internet in response to some
HTML mail. Since we have three computers and one phone all trying to
use the same telephone line, this is disconcerting at best and can
cause crashes as well, especially if one of us is already online.
By having the HTML email sent to online services, I'm already online
on purpose when I'm looking at content that might make my programs want
to connect. I can do this when I choose, since I don't have any of my
urgent personal or business mail coming to these accounts.
A further use of such accounts is for receiving attachments that you
know are going to be fairly large. Having them sent to an online email
address means you can choose when to download them, which can be
a significant advantage if you have a slower connection. (Of course,
this only works as long as the attachments don't exceed your allowed
mailbox space at the online service.)
So much for my "impersonal" email.
For my personal email, I finally got tired of having all my messages
come into my Inbox. I have separate folders for different subjects, and
I had been sorting through all the mail to decide whether to save it
and, if so, where to put it. This was okay before I started getting the
volume of email I have lately. I moderate one fairly prolific email
group and receive email from a number of others; even in digest form,
this can add up quickly. Buried in between are messages from friends,
family, and people who would like to hire me to do something.
So I finally set up some filters in my email program. These allow
you to sort your incoming mail into different folders according to
sender, subject, or other criteria you select. They're fairly
straightforward to set up: look for "Message Filters" or "Mail
Rules."
Now when the mail comes in, it sorts itself, and I can decide which
category I want to deal with first. Only high priority items or
unexpected communications show up in the Inbox. My ISP, EarthLink, also
manages to filter out some of the spam that would otherwise reach
me.
So far, so good. My current sorting system is far from flawless, but
it's better than nothing.
What are your favorite methods of dealing with email? Send me a
letter . . . I mean drop me an email at Beverly Woods
,
and I will include your best suggestions in a future column.
