How to Manage Your Work Email so That It Doesn’t Manage You
Those of us who have a work-only email address will be familiar with filtering through our inboxes, hoping that we don’t miss any important emails hidden amongst the spam and other unimportant messages that we seem to receive on a daily basis. There seems to be not much that we can do to stop certain spam messages from reaching our inbox, and even with spam and junk settings at the highest degree possible, annoying spam still manages to constantly find its way into our email inbox. If you’re at your wits end with your work email and are wondering how to manage it rather than let it manage you, you’re in the right place! We’ve put together a list of handy tips and tricks to help you get control over your inbox and wave bye bye to spam and junk mail forever! Read on to find out more.
Don’t Give it Out
If you find yourself signing up for newsletters, promotional deals, or even using your work email address to buy goods online whether for personal or work reasons, this is probably why you’re experiencing so much spam mail. The golden rule of managing your email inbox and not receiving countless amounts of spam mail per day is to reserve your email address only for clients and customers to use when getting in touch with you. If you need an email address to buy goods online, we suggest that you have a separate email address for those purposes alone – that way, any spam will go to an address that your clients don’t have, and you won’t find yourself sifting through truckloads of junk mail every morning trying to find that all-important latest order from a big client.
Send Less Email
It sounds obvious, but if you want to receive less email, you should be sending less email. If you’re using your email address to send messages to people other than your clients, customers and staff, you’ll find that you’ll also have them replying to you, and this can quickly take over your inbox. If it’s not absolutely necessary that you need to email somebody other than a client, member of staff or customer with your work email, you should use an alternative email address or even alternative method of communication where possible. Although they’re not technically classed as junk mail, unimportant replies to emails that you’ve sent to others can also be a cause of a cluttered inbox.
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Filter Messages
If you haven’t yet learned how to use your work email’s filter settings, now is definitely the time to do so. Most of the major email platforms – Google Mail, Outlook, Hotmail, and Yahoo – all have different filter settings for email inboxes, so whichever one you use, you should be able to easily find them and set your inbox to filter out messages that you don’t need. Set the spam filter to high, and make sure that you list any clients, customers and members of staff that you will be emailing as a contact, in order to ensure that spam mail goes to the spam box, and important emails stay at the top of your inbox.
Use Folders
If you have a lot of clients, customers and staff members that you keep in touch with via this email address, it can be a good idea to implement the use of folders, or different inboxes for each contact. This way, if you’re looking for an email from a specific client, for example, all you will need to do is find that client’s folder where the email will go straight to as soon as it is sent. This is a much easier way of doing things if you tend to receive a significant number of email messages a day, and can help you save time looking for important client messages when you check your email in the morning, as there is no need to sift through lots of unread new messages to find the one you’re looking for.
Acknowledge Receipt
If you don’t let the sender know that you’ve received their message, they may send even more mail, wondering whether or not you’ve read what it was that they had to say. A simple read receipt message such as ‘Thanks, got it’ will let your sender know that you’ve seen their message and will reply shortly, and allows them to tick it off the to-do list for the day. If you’re out of the office, you may want to consider setting up an automated reply to let senders know you’ll be back in touch with them soon.
How do you manage your work emails?
Guest Author: Carol Trehearn
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