Nov 22, 2008

Taking control of your email inbox (part 1); The good, the bad and the ugly

Posted by: Donato in Recruiting, Technology, Unified Communications, tags: best practices, Donato Diorio, email filtering, email inbox, spam

It’s Saturday, I’m in at the office and I have 350+ emails in my in-box. Arghhh. I took a 1/2 day off on Friday to be the helper at my daughters school…so I got behind. However, 350 emails is just crazy.

Here is approximately how the numbers broken down.

The Good

50 legitimate business emails. These are client, partners and prospects that I want to communicate with
5 personal emails.
10 alerts from various services
120 LinkedIN invitations. No problem here, but I don’t need to see these in my inbox.

The Bad

30 invites to various webinars. Most of these are from legitimate business connections that somehow decided I should go on a general distribution list.

The Ugly

50 requests from other social networks.
75 absolute unwanted spam messages.

Somehow I let my in-box get away from me. I lost track of best practices. Anyone with some ideas on managing an out-of-control inbox, I want to hear from you. This blog is part 1. In part 2, I post the solutions & suggestions that I gather over the coming weeks. Part 2 will only be posted once I get back control of my email inbox.

For those about to send me suggestions. I already make good use of filters and I have a professional email spam-blocking service that I am happy with. The spams I am getting are from contacts that somehow make the conceptual leap from being a business connection to putting me on their distribution lists.

Idea: wouldn’t it be nice to have a program that took all webinars and events emails and only shows you ones that fit your schedule? hmmm

part 2…under development.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Recruiting, Technology, Unified Communications.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Taking control of your email inbox (part 1); The good, the bad and the ugly”

tkleese says:
November 24th, 2008 at 8:33 am
Friday was unusually quiet so I cleaned up my Inbox until there was nothing left. I plugged in reminders in my Calendar for any emails flagged as follow-up.

This morning I had maybe 25 emails and I’m down to zero again. Feel liberating and although it takes some time, I now have a greater sense of focus.

Shally Steckerl wrote something about this and if he can do it, anybody can.
gutmach says:
December 8th, 2008 at 10:46 am
Well, you say you’re good with filters, yet you have 120 LinkedIn invitations in your inbox? It sounds like you need an email filter there, too. You can use subject line text in combination with the sender name to eliminate those and still allow other LinkedIn communications to hit your inbox if you so desire. As for matching webinar & event emails with what fits your schedule, yes, you’ll find a number of VC firms ready to fund that one!
A Breakdown In Communication « Amybeth Hale - Research Goddess says:
December 8th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
[...] also made themselves more available for real human interaction. Donato DiOrio recently posted on his blog about filtering and actually requested some input for ideas on how to best tackle this [...]