Information Overload

At present, I have 1200 emails in my inbox, which covers April and May, after transferring or deleting another 500 or so. At the end of the month or when convenient (plane rides) I sort emails into monthly folders or project specific folders.

I have tried filters, however I have found that if new messages are not in the inbox, which is the first thing you see, I do not always see them in a timely manner. In other words, one has to remember to view the new messages in each folder.

In April of this yer I started using a Blackberry for e-mail while on the road (and for taking those grainy pictures I post here on the COW!) but I also have started using it while in the office to monitor incoming messages, and to try to not be so tied to my laptop.

Today I discovered a wealth of useful plug-ins for Mozilla Thunderbird, the e-mail software we use here.

Now I have tabs across the top of my e-mail display, like in a web browser, displaying quick links to the most used folders - such as for busy clients or projects.

A plug-in that I had wanted for years is now available. If you type the word "attached" or "attachment" in a message and then hit send sans attachment (a very common problem), you are asked if you wanted to send an attachment. Brilliant!

Another useful one is the ability to browse the web from within the email software. For example, if someone sends you a link, you can view the web page without opening your web browser. This saves time in several ways, as you are only viewing the link, not being tempted to check out your favorite websites. Also, although it may take a few seconds to open your actual browser, it is another app that you may not need to actually open at that very moment.

Finally, Clean Subject cleans up the subject line in long threads. Honestly, we do not need to see:

Fwd: Re: Re: Fwd: Re: Re: video edits

Re: video edits will suffice in most cases.

Since my web mail is fairly utilitarian, I have also copied my local folders to my home computer, so if need be I can access all of my e-mail since 1998 at home without lugging the laptop home for this contingency every night. I set the webmail server to retain messages for 30 days, so I need only open Thunderbird at home every 30 days to keep up to date.

Presumably Outlook will do a lot of the same things.

Another useful tool is Google Desktop. This indexes your hard drive, and is much faster than Windows or Thunderbird for searching. If I search "hernia" for example, I get 746 results (popular topic), including e-mails (displayed in web browser even though they reside in Thunderbird), word docs (I don't think Windows XP can search within documents), images (displayed as thumbnails in the browser search results) and whatever else.

Anyone have a similar experience or solution for managing a lot of work-related e-mail?

Mike Cohen