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Sim­ple way to con­trol your email – your own way

Blogs and arti­cles about per­sonal pro­duc­tiv­ity have been very pop­u­lar last few years. They present ways to make life a lit­tle eas­ier by look­ing into every cor­ner of our daily activ­ity, ana­lyz­ing our behav­ior and try to find bet­ter solu­tions for every action.  

I have read quite some of these. My main prob­lem with all this good advise is that I some­times have a feel­ing that the author is tak­ing his own nat­ural behav­ior and tries to make a sys­tem out of it. Then tries to get oth­ers to adapt to their sys­tem. I find a lot of those great ideas just too strict. Too much work to make the sys­tem and too much work to main­tain it. And what I really hate is: There is no way for me to keep that kind of a tidi­ness up on a daily basis. Don’t get me started on Empty Inbox, please.

Here is an attempt to describe few ways I am using to tame my email, my own way. It does only require a very lit­tle upfront work – almost none. You can even develop your own ver­sion bit by bit. At the begin­ning of each month you only have to clean a lit­tle bit more. Actu­ally this might get be some­thing you love to do because you will have a lit­tle bit bet­ter notion what is in your mail.

Hope­fully you get some ideas you can use your­self, even inspi­ra­tion on how you can make a sys­tem that fits your own personality.

Rules. Fil­ter­ing out what can wait.

Here is my sce­nario: I get close to 3000 mails every month. Luck­ily this is not all work related mail as such. It’s related in the sense that I sub­scribe to some mail lists that either con­cern my work and even some which con­cern my inter­ests — half related if you will. I don’t have to read these lists as they come in. In many cases it can just wait until I get some spare time to read it. This also includes some newslet­ters like the ones I get from the font foundries, about 20 mails each month. I get sim­i­lar mails from soft­ware ven­dors, mag­a­zines , etc. And by the way, have you tried to unsub­scribe a news let­ter or mail list? It’s not always easy.

Any­way, the best thing here is to make rules. Every grown up mail appli­ca­tion has the abil­ity to make rules. First you have to decide where you want to let that cer­tain mails go and then you ask the rule to move every mail from this sender to that folder. It’s easy as that. You can even edit the rule later if you find a rea­son to do so. In some cases you might want all mail of cer­tain kind, like from the font foundries in my case to go into the same sub­folder. Rules allow you to make rules that include all mail from @sender.com or @sender2.com. Do as you think suits you best and keep in mind that you can always change that later. Just check the Help file of the mail appli­ca­tion and search for rules.

I have well over 50 rules of this kind and they move about 2000 mails away from my Inbox each month to be read at some bet­ter time or even deleted after a fast eye scan of the subjects.

Sub­fold­ers.

Most peo­ple have a sub­folder or two in their mail appli­ca­tion. I have three, Junk, Sent Items (which is for mail sent when I use the web inter­face), and Sort. This Sort folder cur­rently has 17 sub­fold­ers of areas I deal with every day or occa­sion­ally. To name just a few: Per­sonal, Work, Fonts, Com­put­ers, Media, Mac Friends, Design, Archive, Travel and some more. You see, com­bi­na­tion of my inter­ests and work related stuff. Most of these Sub­fold­ers have sub­fold­ers inside too – too many to count. Here is one exam­ple of the sub-subfolders I use, Travel.

Into this sub­folder I col­lect man­u­ally all mail that con­cerns a trip I am going to. Book­ing state­ments, flights, com­mu­ni­ca­tion with hotels, etc. In this case I name the fold­ers by the year and loca­tion. It might give you an idea how you can orga­nize yours.

Another exam­ple of such a folder is one named Fonts. It has as we speak 11 sub­fold­ers. Five are for font mail lists where rules take care of feed­ing the fold­ers. Oth­ers I use to man­u­ally move mails to if the sub­ject is of my inter­est. It might be some mate­r­ial I col­lect for a blog arti­cle, a ref­er­ence or some­thing that con­cerns some com­mu­ni­ca­tion about some font related job I am doing.

Yet another is Com­put­ers with over 20 sub fold­ers. Com­put­ers are one of my respon­si­bil­i­ties at work and I need many cat­e­gories here. You may have a com­pletely dif­fer­ent mat­ter that needs a sim­i­lar sub­di­vi­sion. It may be com­mu­ni­ca­tion about our mail server, one about busi­ness soft­ware, color man­age­ment and so on. These folder get to host the mails about buy­ing soft­ware and ser­ial and license although I keep that infor­ma­tion in another data­base I like to keep the orig­i­nal mails too. All the mails I move into these fold­ers I move man­u­ally because I want to see these mail in my Inbox grab vital infor­ma­tion out of it and move it myself.

Just remem­ber that you are not stuck with any setup till eter­nity and you should not even try to make the per­fect one in one go. Things change at work, inter­ests change, you leave one group and join another. Fold­ers are great for some of the mail. Although Spot­light search it great in Mail and many other mail appli­ca­tions it’s not always fool­proof or should I say I am not always fool­proof when I am search­ing. That’s why I like to have some of those folders.

The most impor­tant Subfolder.

The most impor­tant sub­folder is the Archive folder. It’s one of the 17 sub­fold­ers. Let’s have a look at it.

Inside the Archive folder there are fold­ers in this order (actu­ally almost every­one I work with has this Archive folder just like this) :

Those with the years in their name have two sub fold­ers each like this: Out 2010, Q1.2010, Q2.2010, Q3.2010 and Q4.2010. The Out2010 also has Q1.2010, Q2.2010, Q3.2010 and Q4.2010. The names say it all doesn’t it? If you have more or heav­ier mail than I do you might want to use 12 fold­ers named 01 Jan­u­ary, 02 Feb­ru­ary and so on. You could of course choose to have two fold­ers first: Out2010 and In2010, but the thing is that I have to go into the Out fold­ers much less, so I decided to do it this way.

Every month I move all mail from the inbox to the quar­terly fold­ers. If you need to use fold­ers by month move it to the cor­rect month. I also move sent mail to sub­se­quent fold­ers. So after all I have an empty Inbox once every month.

The last folder, gamalt sort is just a small pile of very old mails I keep for sen­ti­men­tal rea­sons or what ever. It even has two mails from 1995, just to give you some idea.

But what about unat­tended mail from the last days of the pre­vi­ous month, now moved over to the archive? That’s where flag­ging and Smart Mail­boxes come in.

Flag. I have to deal with some mail right away but some can wait a bit longer.

Of all the 30–50 mails that finally end up in my Inbox every day there are some that are more rest­less than oth­ers. They need to be dealt with either now, soon or later but if you want to be the good worker and polite email user you want to deal with it sooner than later. You reply to all your mail don’t you? Reply to peo­ple that you have got their mail and you will deal with it later if you can’t do it right now.

We need to mark the mail some­how. There are a few options here. Flag is one of the most obvi­ous. I think every mail appli­ca­tion has flags. Usu­ally you can use a key­board short­cut to flag a mail and it’s a great time saver. You also need to un–flag the mail when the job is done or reply sent. Usu­ally it’s the same key­board short­cut you can use.

But I need more. I want the mail to really stand out so it’s easy to see imme­di­ately what mails still need some atten­tion. I wished Mail had easy col­or­ing options like Thun­der­bird and Eudora have and I would also want to see Mail get some of the util­i­ties Out­look has. But Mail is get­ting bet­ter with every ver­sion and there are some add ons for free or for a lit­tle sum of money.

I flag the mail I really need to attend to in the next few min­utes or hours and also those who I need to file away later, ser­ial num­bers, receipts for buy­ing some­thing etc. I use this fea­ture spar­ingly; overuse will dimin­ish the impor­tance. Through the day I try my best to do the actions required by the mails, reply, design and all that but things I have to file or which I have flagged as a memo I leave flagged and deal with that later. And of course I take the flag off when I have done what was required.

There is an incred­i­ble tool I use along with the flag­ging. It’s called Mail Act-On from indev.ca. It’s only avail­able for Mail but sim­i­lar tools might be avail­able for other mail appli­ca­tions. There is an old free ver­sion 1.3.3. which works on Leop­ard and pre­vi­ous sys­tems. I used the free ver­sion to begin with and it is great. But there is a far bet­ter and more advanced ver­sion Mail Act-On 2 for just about $25, which I use now. It is really pow­er­ful. You should try out the demo at least and see how it can boost your mail han­dling. Check out the other pow­er­ful appli­ca­tion Indev Soft­ware makes, Mail Tags. I have that one too, but tag­ging mail and files it’s not a sub­ject here although it would be worth some dis­cus­sion later. On the other hand it adds more options which Mail Act-On and Mail rules can use.

Basi­cally Mail Act-On is a rule acti­va­tor and using it is really sim­ple. One key­board short­cut (I use Con­trol + g) flags and labels my mails yel­low (The Ice­landic word for yel­low is gulur) and flags them at the same time and another short­cut labels the mails back to white (Con­trol +h) (Ice­landic white is hvi­tur) when I am done and takes the flag off at the same time. The yel­low mails sim­ply yells at me. You can impro­vise tons of other ways to use it.

I try to be at least that respon­sive that I get to reply to the mails before they run off the screen. On a busy day I scroll few times dur­ing the day if I see Today reach­ing for the edge of the mail win­dow. There is still a dan­ger I’ll loose some col­ored mails out of sight and even over to the Archive when a new month starts but here is how I use Smart Mail­boxes to pre­vent disasters.

Smart Mail­boxes.

Smart Mail­boxes are actu­ally more or less the same thing as Smart Fold­ers in Find­ers Side­bar. Where ever they are, in Mail, in my RSS reader or in the Finder they are one of the best things that Apple has added to the sys­tem lately in my opin­ion. Smart fold­ers allow you to sort together related things with­out hav­ing to move it from the place they are sit­u­ated. The key thing why Smart fold­ers are so great for added pro­duc­tiv­ity is not hav­ing to mem­o­rize every­thing, just know where to find it.

When you make Smart Mail­boxes in Mail you are asked to give it some cri­te­ria for it to find for you mails of a cer­tain kind. It can be mails from cer­tain sender or senders, by sub­ject, etc. As you see on this pic­ture, Mail Act-On and Mail­Tag have added quite some options to the list you will see on your mac when you make a new Smart Mailbox.

One of the fea­tures I like the most is that I am able to have a Smart Mail­box that keeps track of all flagged and/or col­ored mail, where ever it is. It may be in my Inbox still or in Archive, another mail account or sorted away deep down in a sub­folder. That way I won’t loose track of the mail I really need or want to do some­thing more with.

Another great thing about Smart Mail­boxes is that although its find­ings comes from var­i­ous places in my mail it is not aliases. I can do what ever I want with it, delete the find­ings, reply or any­thing you would expect from any mail.

One thing I do is that I like to see every mail that comes from some travel agen­cies and soft­ware ven­dors and more of that sort. I don’t need to keep those mail at all. It’s mostly some time lim­ited offers. I define two Smart Mail­boxes by Match all From: to keep track of those. I need two Smart Mail­boxes because the addresses are many. I call those @ Ruslinfo and RuslInfo2 (Rusl means Dump). Every once in a while I look at those boxes and send it to the trash to free up some mails from the Inbox.

Another sim­i­lar idea for some of the Smart Mail­boxes is to keep sep­a­rate track of all the mails that I get related to social media like Face­book, Twit­ter and LinkedIn. I like to see what’s hap­pen­ing, who’s fol­low­ing, etc. Clean out about once a month or just when I feel like.

And one more. When a project is being worked on I like to gather all the mail con­cern­ing it in one place. Because I don’t sort it after­wards I sim­ply change the cri­te­ria to use the same Smart Mail­box again for another job. The rea­son is that some­times set­ting up the cri­te­ria is rather com­plex and I like to reuse as much as I can. So, make Smart Mail­boxes for long or short term uses as you go.

Few other tid­bits about trim­ming the mail.

As you know by now I still have some old mail. But that is not a prob­lem at all. Mail has a great fea­ture which is buried in the Mes­sage menu: Remove Attach­ments. It deletes the attach­ments from selected mail. By doing that to older mail you keep all the mail you want and it takes very lit­tle space. The name of the attach­ment still lives on in the mails so it’s easy to find it on your com­puter if it still exists.

Mail appli­ca­tions should not be used as data­base and cer­tainly not for heavy attach­ments. Save the attach­ments as they arrive to your com­puter, to fold­ers where it belongs. It gives you the power to delete the attach­ments later with­out any fur­ther thoughts.

I do this for mail that is two years old or more. That way I can be pretty sure that every­thing work related is saved. For my work it’s impor­tant that we don’t delete work related mail for two to three years but there is no rea­son to have it be a bur­den on the mail server.

Try look­ing at the mail from a dif­fer­ent angle too. Use sort­ing by dif­fer­ent columns like for instance by name. Some peo­ple have sent you tons of unnec­es­sary mail or mail that has no rel­e­vance any­more, haven’t they? Dump it.

Then try to sort by size. Choose all quar­terly fold­ers from one year. Most likely you can safely delete some most heavy attach­ments already. How about look­ing at your sent files? Most of the attach­ments came from your own com­puter any­way, so why not delete these dupli­cates right now?

Rocket sci­ence

This is more and less what I do to keep my san­ity when it comes to han­dling my mail and not the least to keep track of what needs to be done and what can wait for a bet­ter time or even what can be com­pletely dis­carded. Every­ones needs are slightly dif­fer­ent. I hope you get some inspi­ra­tion to make your own sys­tem to con­trol your email. It’s far bet­ter than it con­trol­ling you.