A few email tips that spring to mind...
Send Less
E-mails are like tribbles or gremlins, they multiply exponentially. The more you send, the more you receive. Obvious...but think about it. The more you send...the more you receive. Often if you are getting slammed with email its because you just spent the last 24 hours sending and answering emails. Sometimes one 5 minute phone call can eliminate 12 emails back and forth. And eliminate an open loop you keep thinking about. I always tell people send less emails out..and don't feel you need to respond to each and every item.
Use IMAP
Switch to IMAP and avoid POP. POP email is a little 90's, you'll spend hours copying your emails between computers. IMAP keeps the email on the server, and current email programs keep a local copy. Not only is this amazingly faster, but a message is updated in real time. If you are on your iPhone with an iMAP account and you delete an email you can literally look over and see it "vanish" on your Mac desktop mail. You can always undo it by hitting updo delete message to retrieve the cached local copy. Once you get IMAP on all your phones, laptops and desktops, and everything is in sync and updated in real time, you will wonder why you did not switch to IMAP sooner. IMAP absolutely makes organizing and categorizing faster and easier to manage.
No Gmail
Avoid Gmail for professional work. Years ago I had a popular podcast and we had a gmail account for it, we had all our contacts and 2 years worth of fan mail and correspondence in it. It got hacked into, we could not get in because our password was changed. Google responded by shutting down the account "for our protection" and verified there had been a security breach. They had no further info and after 2 weeks of going back and forth with their tech support ("we have no additional info") we realized that our gmail account was never to be seen again. It's odd google would do this, but the fact is we put 2 years of content into essentially a free service still in beta. It was a hard lesson, but I now always use a hosted domain service that I pay for. Same goes for twitter and facebook, these free services, your account, could be switched off at any time and for any reason, so keep it in mind. If you are paying for a service, at least you have some rights as a consumer, but with free and beta stuff...well...
Smart Mailboxes and Mail Folders
I use mail folders and smart mailboxes (Mac mail)..the key is moving stuff out of the mail box. The smart mailboxes allow quickly pulling up all email from a certain address. So I can move stuff out of my inbox but still call it up from my save folder when I need to. I also have client folders, when a client oriented item comes in, I move it to that folder. I have an "explore" folder, this is email that is interesting, not mission critical, email I may want to look over later. I also use programs like OmniFocus which has a keystroke to pull individual emails into the program, from there I can move it to a task or project list and in my mail program move it out of the inbox. The main thing is to keep clearing the inbox and move emails where they should be. Organize..not respond to everything right away..just organize everything right away. Clearing your inbox often is like clearing your mind, and helps you to stop thinking "I am sure there are things I must be missing" when you have an inbox of hundreds of unorganized messages.
Frank
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Franklin McMahon / Host
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