How to Get a Handle on E-mail

Do you control e-mail or does it control you? While e-mail has become a necessary business and personal tool, it can also disrupt your day and sap your time. Follow these tips for sending, receiving and filing your messages, and you'll make e-mail your servant, not your master.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Sending

1. Use brief but detailed subject lines. These save the recipient time.
2. Keep messages short and simple. Put all important information in the first paragraph.
3. Call or set up a face-to-face meeting if the information is critical, confidential or time sensitive.
4. Make it easy for people to respond to your messages. Get to the point, and let recipients know what action they should take.
5. Create lists or groups of addresses if you frequently send messages to the same bunch of people. For example, using a family group will ensure that everyone gets exactly the same news at the same time, so nobody is left out of the loop.
6. Avoid overusing or abusing people's addresses. Only send a message when you need to, and don't forward every joke that comes along.

Receiving

7. Set aside certain times of day for answering e-mail, so it doesn't become a constant distraction.
8. Learn to use your e-mail program's spam filter and rules function. For example, rules can automatically file messages from designated addresses in a specified folder, such as weekly airline fare e-mails into a "Travel" folder.
9. Ask people who CC you needlessly to kindly stop doing so.

Filing

10. Create and use folders and subfolders in your e-mail program. You can organize by sender, subject matter, project or any combination that makes sense to you.
11. Empty your deleted mail regularly, or set your e-mail program to do this automatically. Know that even a deleted message can be retrieved and live to haunt you for a long, long time: Never send confidential or inappropriate e-mail from work.
12. Find out if your company's tech department is filing and archiving all messages on company servers. E-mail is becoming increasingly important as evidence in court.

Tips & Warnings

• Back up your e-mail regularly. In corporate environments, the tech department will do this. At home, use your e-mail's built-in backup program; programs like WinGuides Software's Email Saver Xe (about $30 at WinGuides.com) make the task even easier.
• Use encryption when you send personal or sensitive information. Most modern e-mail applications can add encryption; check your program's help file for instructions.
• Avoid using all capital letters. In e-mail, capitals are the equivalent of SHOUTING, and are also harder to read.
• Dedicate a separate free e-mail account to use when shopping online or participating in message boards. This will help reduce spam and keep your main address private.
• Invest in virus-protection software and keep it updated.
• Don't dump the default folders that came with your e-mail program (such as Inbox or Outbox), even if you don't use them. Deleting them can corrupt the program's database.

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