I will soon start a new job where I expect to receive significantly more emails than I do currently. So far, I haven’t had a system in place, except for marking emails as unread until I respond and occasionally using flags.
I would like to change that practice, now that I have a clean slate. But how do I start managing my inbox?
I use Mac Mail and would like to continue using it. I know how to set up rules and create smart mailboxes etc., but I can’t really see the potential.
Thank you!
Easy: leave all emails that might be important as unread. That way, you know they’re important because they’re unread. Continue to never read them until you’ve got over 400 unread emails in your inbox. Then just mass delete any more than a month old, because they can’t still be important or relevant. Continue to feel guilty and not read emails.
Absolutely flawless system for me so far.
For me I set up my corporate inbox with tons of rules to automate sorting inbound emails to relevant folders. I worked in software support so I had folders for each company my team communicated with on a regular basis, folders for internal emails like announcements and business/facilities updates, and the general inbox just caught anything I hadn’t created a rule for yet. Outlook folders all display unread counts to it was easy for me.
I didn’t delete anything. I let my companies retention policy handle that.
Did you then reply from the folders, or what was the point of this sorting? Genuine question.
And can you give rule examples? Was it just @ending go to folder A? ☺️
Yeah basically the rules where “if from domain A go to folder A.”
The organized folders basically served as a way to filter through stuff that I didn’t need to respond to, break things down into tasks I actually needed to respond to, and to make it easier to search through later.
So if I got an email from user@xdomain, it would go to my xdomain folder and be listed as unread and I would respond from there. Then that email chain stayed in its appropriate folder.
Personally I automatically label and filter out of my inbox automatic emails, stuff that come often. So my inbox usually only has mails that concern me. And then I handle them the same way as you do: keep them unread till I handle them. Then archive those that are “ended”.
The first thing I do when I start at a new place is create a mark “X accepted your meeting invite” mails as read & auto-archive.
Immediately cuts out so much noise, and you will still get any Tentative/Declined in your inbox. Always the first thing because at the beginning you are likely setting up lots of meetings with new people.
This is exactly how I do mine as well. Using the “+label” with Gmail (address+label@gmail.com) helps with filtering as well.
Not who you are replying to but I always fell back to a single monolithic inbox with categories/labels as the differentiator (professionally and personally).
For me, this was down to my line of work where client projects would be anywhere between 1-6mths, each with a revolving door of stakeholders. If I had the time during mobilisation, I could set up a system but it would just take one particularly active day or brief holiday worth of incoming for it to no longer be managable - resulting in my emails now being in two places making it annoying in time critical situations, and easier to miss mails generally.
Lastly, less of an issue these days but I used to always run into search issues when everything was segregated into folders. Sometimes this was due to early 2010s online inboxes still being anemic in size (and forced to offline archive) and, sometimes I think it was just old software creaking. Filtering by tag/category/label was always functionally the same number of steps for me but yielded better results - and for incoming, visually seeing a brightly coloured label in the single list of mail draws my eye more than a small “(1)” in a sizeable folder structure.
I use outlook at work but again it’s more about the process.
My inbox is my “to do” list. I have lots of folders and subfolders and I file everything. Once a day I try to take a few minutes to file stuff that’s been dealt with.
I do also file some "sent"mail too as I’m kinda CYA cautious like that.
I get a bit stressed if my inbox gets to the point where I have to scroll down through it - that tells me I need to delegate, file or close out some items.
Some people never file anything and just use the search function in whatever email client they’re in, but I’m a bit old and never had that function in the early days so it doesn’t come naturally to me - an inbox with 20,000 messages in it just freaks me out.
I also use the conversation function which keeps everything tied together regardless of which folder it’s in.
Trial and error. You don’t have to stick to a routine or method - if it’s not working for you, change something until it does.
Very similar to my own methods, right down to filing important Sent items. This can come in extremely useful when it’s your word against another (often senior) colleagues, that you had reported a concern. Being able to quickly recall what and when was said can shut down an argument before it has blossomed.
I mentioned in your earlier question about how I use Todoist and work through the inbox. In Mac Mail, I also use MailTags and MailActOn (e.g., t forwards the email to my Todoist inbox) to create rules to tag and file messages, or add ticklers quickly using keyboard shortcuts. I’m not sure how I will do this once macOS breaks Mail add ons…
