Email management

[Barrister]

So with a new job comes a new email account.

At my old job I completely lost control of my inbox.  It had a few thousand emails.  But of course that isn't the end of the world - the search function becomes extremely handy.

But now I'm trying to stay on top of my inbox - either religiously delete emails, or file them into several sub-files for things I might need in the future.

so what do you other office drones do about email?  How large is your inbox?

[Caliga]

Right now there are 2,601 emails in my inbox, which for me isn't many.  At one point I had ~18,000 emails in there.  What I try to do is archive emails once a month and then once a quarter, put them into a more distant archive on my shared home folder.  Also, I try to archive sentmail but I don't do it as frequently since I very rarely need to go back to that.

[Slargos]

Too - fucking - large.

I get antsy when I have more than 20-30 mails in my inbox and I sort both it and sent since I often need to go back and check whether I sent a particular item or not, and what the details were.

Should have some auto-sort function.. 

[Zanza2]

I try to keep the emails that I might need again in the future, both sent and received. I store it in folders that group stuff that belongs together. I immediately delete an email after I read it if it doesn't seem important.
We also have some mailboxes in the project that I currently work on that we CC all the important stuff to so it is documented. There used to be an archive service that would compress all attachments after a while and store them somewhere else so your mailbox wouldn't grow above quota. But they deactivated it now.

My company still uses IBM Lotus Notes by the way, which is terrible. We'll switch to Outlook next year and apparently most of our archived stuff will not be migrated.

[viper37]

so what do you other office drones do about email?  How large is your inbox?

very large inbox

I use folders, subfolders, and rules.

One rule is for all plans receives, they go in a folder called "plan".  From there, I print the files, quote the job, and further classify them in a specific subfolder if there's more than one email.

Jobs that require tons of exchange between clients, architectets, engineers back&forth for the same fucking piece of paper (that's public work for you  ) go into their specific folders, and from there I classify them manually in the appropriate subfolder.

Fax goes in fax folder, from there I decide if I need to print it for my father, or if I file it in my e-mails.  Unfortunately, I cannot automatically filter my faxes (subject is always "Fax", sender is always the fax machine name).

Spam filter filtrates most of the junk stuff.

Only one tiny little problem is when I'm not in the office.  My assistant doesn't understand english at all, so she has no clue if a spam fax/e-mail is really spam or something worth my time, so I'm stuck to sort through this all, even if they're marked as read.

[Maximus]

All of them. I never delete emails. I keep them all read though. At worst I may have 20-30 unread if I've been off the computer for a while.

[Zanza2]

I don't think I ever received a single spam mail on my work account.

[garbon]

All my work is project based and have folders for each project.

[KRonn]

I can usually delete most of my email after a couple weeks or a month. I keep some longer, and save some to disk, but I usually don't need to keep lots of stuff for too long.

[Grey Fox]

Rules! Create rules!

Especially for mail that is from an automated software & mailing lists.

[Martinus]

So with a new job comes a new email account.

At my old job I completely lost control of my inbox.  It had a few thousand emails.  But of course that isn't the end of the world - the search function becomes extremely handy.

But now I'm trying to stay on top of my inbox - either religiously delete emails, or file them into several sub-files for things I might need in the future.

so what do you other office drones do about email?  How large is your inbox?

We have something called "FAYG" (File As You Go). When you close an e-mail you opened (or are sending your own e-mail) you are required to assign a matter number/code to it (you have a drop down menu with "recent matters" so this is not as painful as it sounds), which then causes that e-mail to be automatically filed in that matter folder on the server.

[Barrister]

So with a new job comes a new email account.

At my old job I completely lost control of my inbox.  It had a few thousand emails.  But of course that isn't the end of the world - the search function becomes extremely handy.

But now I'm trying to stay on top of my inbox - either religiously delete emails, or file them into several sub-files for things I might need in the future.

so what do you other office drones do about email?  How large is your inbox?

We have something called "FAYG" (File As You Go). When you close an e-mail you opened (or are sending your own e-mail) you are required to assign a matter number/code to it (you have a drop down menu with "recent matters" so this is not as painful as it sounds), which then causes that e-mail to be automatically filed in that matter folder on the server.

Sounds like a good idea.

At my old office I would cc my assistant on anything important, and she would import the email onto the filing system.

I don't see anything like that here, so I'm just going to have to print emails off and place on the file.

[Monoriu]

High 4 figures.  No filing.  No rules.  I just deal with them one at a time 

[Martim Silva]

so what do you other office drones do about email?  How large is your inbox?

Hopeless to try to control it. I have about 10,000 emails in the box, and I will not delete them, as they sometimes come in handy.

(especially when somebody tries to rip you off, just to find that you can produce that 2-year-old e-mail that shows that they are in gross violation of some rule by trying to pull the scam at that precise time, for example)

[DGuller]

I just periodically dump my inbox onto local folder once I get a mailbox size warning.  I don't delete anything.  I use search to find something I really need.  Tags would be very helpful, but alas, we're using Outlook at work.