I have a specific system that I use to manage my email. You may have a different system, and I'd like to hear about it in the comments. I use my Gmail account for all my email. Even the mail sent to my official website contact address gets forwarded to Gmail and is treated the same way. No new mail! Want to read updates from your favorite sites? Try Google Reader
I don't really throw much away other than spam. I love the archive feature of Gmail. On many occasions I've searched back in the archive for something. However, I usually only archive an email when I feel I'm done with it. Another feature I love about Gmail are the labels. It makes it so much easier to categorize and color-code emails. I have tons of automated filters (some quite complicated) that sort most of my incoming email into their appropriate labels.
So what I see in my inbox are emails that have already been sorted automatically thanks to my filters (one less thing I have to do manually). From there, I read any new bold-face emails. Some don't require much action after reading them and can be archived.
Others however, I want to reply to. I may not think up a reply right away or may not have the time to. So those ones I leave in my inbox until I decide to take action on them. I'll also leave blog comment notification emails in my inbox until I've decided if I am going to respond to the comment. Basically anything that I leave in my inbox I have plans to take action on. After I've taken that action, I archive it.
If I'm too indecisive about an email and it sits in my inbox for a long time, I'll star it with the special purple question mark superstar, then archive it. I can always find it again easily by looking in my starred emails if I decide to do anything with it at some point.
My official website contact address gets special treatment in that it gets its own inbox using the new multiple inbox feature. I have a filter that assigns a label to all mail sent to or from that address. I then have my multiple inbox set to show only mail with that label and is in my inbox. I use the search term [in:inbox AND label:label name] (without the brackets).
Anyway, this system works quite well for me. I rarely have much buildup and am often able to reach inbox=0. FYI: the empty inbox message in Gmail is:
I bet that a lot of Gmail users never get to see that message!
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
«Gmail Sorting Technique»
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Hi Marf,
ReplyDeleteI use my gmail in a very similar way. Using filters to pre-apply labels is a great help.
I don't get round to archiving as often as I should though.
@ Bunc: Yeah, a lot of people don't. People tend to allow email to build up in their inbox.
ReplyDeleteOr, like me, just have about a dozen email addy's. I'm pretty sure you know them all by now.
ReplyDelete