Saturday, January 19, 2008

Managing the Mindless E-Mails

So when I first started working from home, I was looking all over the place and signing up for every possible "wealth building" program to decide how to accomplish my goal. Soon my In Box was as disorganized and overwhelmed as Brittany's Public relations people.

If I had to do it all over again, I would have gotten a crappy "throwaway" email address that I could delete when I got sick of some of the junk I was getting. One of my friends went to my blog and he clicked on one of the ads and got sucked in and gave his email address. "Make it stop!" he begged. Sorry, buddy, but there is no way to stop spammers once they have your email address.

"But I've already sent out my real email address and I don't want to change it! What can I do to keep my In Box from overflowing?"

1. Mailboxes and RULES:

Well, in most desktop email programs and many web based ones, you can easily set up filters to manage the influx. What I do is set up a different mailbox for each site that I want to continue receiving messages from. This is most of the Survey sites (not Survey Spot!) and a few other mailing lists that I want to look at from time to time. Right click on the message and click on "rules" (In Outlook, there might be a different process elsewhere) and then basically tell Outlook to put all messages from that domain into a folder. Outlook even shows you how many "new" messages you have from that domain. It's handy

2. Different E-mail Programs:

Another idea is to have two different email programs. One can be set up to handle all your junk mail and the other set up for just friends and family. This way you can control which messages you are forced to be exposed to. This means setting up a seperate e-mail account, but I have used this technique in the past and it works well. You can then alert only certain people of the new account and never use it when signing up with any website.

Well, there's my tip of the week! See you soon!

No comments: