How to Be the IT Expert for Your Home-Based Business: Managing Email

Once you start your own home-based business, the amount of email you find in your inbox every day can be overwhelming. Spending time every day digging through your email can divert you from the more important issues of growing your business. A few simple management tools can save you time, aggravation and money.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

1. Use a spam screener. If you’re receiving lots of unwanted email a spam screener will be the first step to getting that deluge under control. There are a variety of them–your computer may have one already installed when you get it–and they range from very basic to all the bells and whistles. Most of them now will allow you to decide how comprehensive or minimal you want your screening to be. You can keep adjusting settings until you have the balance that lets you avoid the mail you know you’ll never want and still receive the mail you do want.
2. Sort your mail for easier viewing. Your email program tools will include one that lets you sort your mail using various criteria. You can sort it by the date it was received, by the person who sent it, by the subject line or by other criteria. The email in any of your boxes or folders can be sorted. If, for example you sort your inbox by the name of the person who sent the email, your email will appear in blocks from each sender. Are you receiving a morning news alert or a stock market update from your favorite business website? If you don’t delete those immediately after reading them, they can really pile up. Sorting your email can let you delete whole blocks of unwanted mail fairly quickly.
3. Create folders. Try this: sort your mail by sender and take a look at how much mail you have accumulated from family and friends. This kind of email can be difficult to delete immediately. After all, email has become a favorite way to share your life with loved ones who live far away. Some emails take on the significance of treasured letters and you don’t want to lose them. One solution is to create a folder for those must keep messages. Your email program tools will show how simple it is to make a new folder and save selected emails to it. Now they are all stored together and your inbox is a lot more manageable.
4. Get familiar with your mail options. If you are like most of us, you have gotten in the habit of using the three or four email functions that you need most often - and ignoring the rest of your options. Take the time to go back to those email tools and explore them. There are lots of great ways to automatically label, sort and delete mail that will help you keep this part of your Internet life more usable.
5. Create a schedule for printing and deleting email. Are you one of those organized folks who spend a few minutes every day or week deleting old unwanted mail? Or are you someone who finds that suddenly nothing in your email program is working very well. You try several troubleshooting functions with no success. Finally you check your mail volume. Oops. If you still have the "Welcome to Your New Computer" email that came when you bought it, you might have a clue as to what is slowing the works. Now you have a huge time consuming job ahead of you–and one that can’t be avoided if you want to use your computer. So get methodical. Decide on a chunk of time each week that you can devote to pruning your email. Be realistic; don’t plan on an amount of time you know you can’t spare. Print them off, delete them or save them to a backup disk, but get as much email as possible out of the email program you use every day.