Tips on Better Email Management

By Marlinda Bullock, askSam Marketing Manager

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In this economy more than ever, everyone needs to become more productive. One area where we all spend too much time is managing our email. I have gathered some tips to help you become more effective when managing email.

Email Tips...

1) Find the right email client for you. Choosing an email client is an important, and personal choice. Many of us land with whatever email client is on our computer (normally Outlook or Outlook Express). But there are other choices, and given the amount of time we spend working with email, it makes sense to check out the alternatives, for example: Eudora, PocoMail, Pegasus, TheBat.

PC Magazine offers a scorecard of email clients and product guides at:

Scorecard: E-mail Clients

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,103907,00.asp

Product Guides > Software > E-mail Clients

http://www.pcmag.com/category2/0,4148,4810,00.asp

There are also Web based email packages such as Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL, which are great for travelers but are not as well suited for business. I use a Yahoo and Hotmail account when subscribing to newsletters/websites where I don't want the company to have my name or business email address.

2) Use your email client's preview feature. This way you can see the subject line and the first few lines of the email and can quickly decide if it justifies your time reading the email or if you should quickly delete it.

3) Set up a filtering system where each message from a certain email address will automatically be put into its own folder. You can set up a folder to only receive your bosses' email or anyone who you receive a lot of email from and is important for you to keep and respond to quickly. Most email packages have the filtering feature under Tools, in Outlook use the "Rules Wizard" and in Outlook Express use "Message Rules.", in Eudora use "Filters".

4) Set up folders and sub-folders to keep from searching through a large inbox. I handle three departments for askSam; marketing, press and resellers. It makes for a lot of email correspondence for each department. I have set up a folder for each which makes it much easier to manage when a question arises or follow up needs to be checked.

5) Plan when you will read and respond to email. On your daily calendar and To Do list, schedule 45-60 minutes in the morning and afternoon to answer and organize email. Resist the temptation to keep checking it throughout the day, or the day will come and go and all you will have done is addressed what others want and not completed the deadlines you know you must meet that day or week.

6) Make a decision as soon as you read the message the first time. For example, respond immediately, or hit reply and save as a draft to remind you to respond later, or move it to the proper folder, or delete it. Once you have responded you can delete the original message or leave it there as a record and later import all your messages into askSam.

7) Import your email into askSam. You knew it was coming...I have to say askSam is amazing with email. When I first arrived at askSam, I admit I was nervous about letting go of any email message I thought I would need later. My Inbox grew to HUGE megs and my laptop slllooowwweeeddd way down. Phil convinced me to import all my folders (aiip listserve, askSam listserve, inbox, newsletters, newsletters we are in, newsletter responses, press, resellers, sales, sent items, unsubscribes, user groups) into askSam. I finally did and now my laptop is much faster, I have all my email messages in the appropriate askSam databases for quick searching and I keep my inbox to a slim 250 messages (it used to be 2,500!). When someone needs to know what happened with press, marketing or when someone's birthday is, I can always find it quickly in an email with askSam. Click here to learn how to import email into askSam.

8) Use a Spam Guard. More and more of our time is wasted on deleting Spam. Ben Brown, askSam Technician, shares his finding on the best protection against Spam. "I have found Spamarrest to work really well. I tried other programs that are supposed to stop junk mail, but they don't really seem to work. One of my concerns before trying it was that I wouldn't know who had tried to send messages to me, and that they would all be blindly sent back to the original senders, and some would not go through. However, there is an option on the site that allows you to view all "unverified mail", so you can see a list of all the mail that was addressed to you. From there, you can manually allow different senders to get through. You can sign up for a free 30 day trial and they don't ask for any kind of credit card verification to start. So far I haven't had ANY junk mail come through with Spamarrest, and for only 35 bucks a year, it's well worth it."

9) Protect your email with an anti-virus protection software. You may have this covered already, but just in case...here are a few to choose from. We use eTrust, it is reasonably priced and works well.

Anti Virus Software:

AVG AntiVirus www.grisoft.com , it's free

eTrust EZ Antivirus: www.my-etrust.com

McAffee www.mcafee.com

Norton AntiVirus www.symantec.com

To assist you even further with better email management we have improved our email

template per your recommendations.

In the new askSam Email template, we've added:

Ÿ     Updated Reports and condensed the size to see more info on the screen

Ÿ     Reports with Quick Views by Date, From, and To (no searches)

Ÿ     Updated Menu with Quick View links on from screen for Date, From and To

Ÿ     Updated Search Views for Date, From and To with Sort Default view sorted by Relevance

Ÿ     Entry Form on import for additional field information

Ÿ     Follow-up and Todo with Entry Form that contains fields to track follow-up for each email

Ÿ     Report to output today's follow-up list

You can download the new askSam Email Template at:

http://www.askSam.com/four/surf29/template.asp

I hope you have found a few of these tips useful. Please feel free to discuss this further with any comments or suggestions you may have on our forum.

Marlinda Bullock

askSam Marketing Manager

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