If you don't handle e-mail clutter and organize your e-mail, it can be
overwhelming and stressful. Of course, checking email a zillion times a day also
can be a huge timewaster and sort of addictive too. And anything that's too
addictive detracts from balance in your life.
♦Every day for a week, check your
personal e-mail just one or two set times daily. Perhaps check email in the
morning and at lunch time. If you're really addicted to email, check it a third
time such as after dinner. Checking personal email three times a day should be
plenty and will be time consuming as it is.
♦ If your e-mail provider has a
sort button above the list of e-mail (which it probably does), hit "sort by
e-mail" or "sort by sender". This will cluster your e-mail by sender and enable
you to handle a group of e-mails from the same sender simultaneously. That's a
great way to weed out some of your irrelevant emails fast.
♦Look through the subject
list of the e-mails and either delete or report and block the e-mail that's
clearly spam. Do not reply to it. That'll just tell spammers you have a good
address and to send you more of it. Or you'll be replying to someone just like
you---whose email address was hijacked to send you that spam. That person will
be just as clueless as you about its origination and you'll solve nothing by
being mad at each other over the unsolicited mail.
♦Also,
make sure you ONLY block real spam. Do not use your report spam
button (if you have one) as a lazy way to delete or unsubscribe to solicited email. That
can cause the email sender to have his or her emails blocked to everyone at your
Internet Service Provider (ISP) if enough people do that. Usually
ISPs won't check to see if a sender is really sending you spam; they'll just
take your word for it.
So don't report email as spam unless it really is
unsolicited spam. If you (or a family member unknowingly to you) subscribed
your email address to receive something, then it is NOT spam. Don't use the
"report and block spam" button as a way to voice your opinion about the quality
of an email newsletter, etc., that you subscribed too. That's not fair to the
sender AND that's not spam.
♦Some email
programs such as Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express also allow you to set
rules (look in your toolbar for this) to handle emails that meet your criteria.
For instance, maybe you want to automatically delete all email with the word
"stock" or "hoodia" or "weight" in the subject line. You can do that.
Outlook will handle this email for you before you ever see that email. You can
undo this rule too later if you think you're deleting too much legitimate
email. Or you can add "exceptions" to the rule such email addresses that should
always come through to you even if they have your chosen words in the subject
line. There are many other "rules" you can set too in your email programs such
as Outlook to help you manage spam email in similar ways.
♦
While you're cleaning up your email, delete all those forwarded jokes (except
for the ones that really strike your fancy) from your friends and associates.
Don't feel obligated to read junk mail just because it comes from people you
know. Just delete them if you don't have time or desire to read the joke of the
day. It's highly unlikely anyone who sends them daily or weekly to groups of
friends or relatives is going to follow-up and ask you if you read them. And it
would be more offensive to tell them not to send them to you than to just hit
the delete key (unless they're sending them to your work address in which case
they could get you fired so do tell them to stop.).
♦The e-mail remaining
now in your in-box should
include e-mail lists you joined. If you no longer want to be on those lists,
open one of the e-mails now and follow the opt-out instructions, which should be
at the bottom of any legitimate email. Anyone sending you legitimate email will
take you off their mailing list at your request.
♦Now read the
e-mail remaining. That's the good stuff!
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