I deal with a lot of email at work, somewhere between 150 and 300 per day. Managing this amount of email can be quite a challenge. Over the past years I’ve become a lot better at dealing with it, and I’d like to share some of the tricks I use to do so.
When I think back now I see how this all may seem a bit obvious, but bad habits formed early sometimes take a while to move away from. This is by no means an ideal system, and it is constantly evolving – new software features change or I find new ways to build filters. I hope what I have learnt might be useful to you, and if you have any other tips it would be great if you could leave a comment.
How did this begin (starting bad habits)
When I started my current job in 2006 I was immediately subscribed to many from discussion group email aliases that a large community of technical staff used to communicate. This was initially a great way to learn information and keep up to date, but quite quickly I became overwhelmed by the sheer amount of email to read. At first I decided to use a folder per alias filing system. With 20 or so folders I would save messages once read (or at least scanned through a few emails in a conversation). Looking back I can’t believe I wasted so much of my time battling with this process. It was extremely time consuming to read and file everything, but was also not ideal when searching for content (at the time I was using Windows XP with Outlook, and google desktop search wasn’t that flash yet).
Another small side effect of saving all this email was the the storage required. I was battling with a storage limit on the Exchange server, 700Mb at the time. To get around this I created local folders in a PST file, and moved messages to the folders there instead. At least I’d reduced one email per month telling me my mailbox was over the size limit.
The first break through (forcing a change)
In late 2007 there was a growing number of my colleagues starting to use Apple Macs at work. I’d been a Mac user at home for a while, but it was seeing my team mates having fewer IT issues combined with a sense of them being able to effectively cope with email, that convinced me to buy an Apple Macbook to use for home and work. This self imposed change was a catalyst for changing the way I dealt with email.
When I moved to using Microsoft Entourage to read email I decided to abandon the multiple folder for discussion lists and have everything stored in just one folder. This saved a lot of time each day that was previously spent drag and drop filing to multiple folders I was doing. It also allowed for much more effective searching, both inside Entourage, not to mention the life saver that Mac OS X spotlight is. How did I live without spotlight for so many years? Even using GREP on cli based mail boxes was better than searching in Outlook on Windows, finally I was back to something where I could recall an email almost instantly with just a few keywords.
I then started to change the process I was using to read/file messages. Instead of dealing with messages as they arrived, or in arrival order in each morning, I started to batch this task. I used the filter views in Entourage to be able to highlight messages for a specific discussion group, using the “any recipient contains” field as a way to get all the messages.
Sorting this list by subject provided a very quick way to sift through discussions. Quickly being able to triage email by subject line, some to be directly filed, some for reading the first email in the thread, some threads needed more of a closer look and so on.
The next change came when I decided to use automatic filter rules to file messages for a couple of specific mailing lists. At first I started with specific lists that was for a subject that wasn’t core to my focus – I could have unsubscribed from the list, but having the emails to hand when searching would be useful. I also tried automatically filtering all mailing lists to a folder with the intention that I would read them later, but that rarely happened.
Overcoming limitations of software (Entourage sucks)
Entourage doesn’t work well when holding large amounts of email.
Like Outlook uses PST files, Entourage uses a single large database to hold all your information. When you’re dealing with 10s of 1000s of emails this becomes quite an issue.
In fact for me it has presented two issues:
Firstly, the size of the single database file can become massive. With that size comes instability. I noticed that once the database reaches upwards of 5Gigabytes issues occur. Entourage may crash and occasionally you’ll have database corruption. The Microsoft Database repair tool on the Mac will analyse and repair your database but it is a time consuming business. Even on a relatively powerful machine with 4GB ram, for a database of 5Gigabytes it can take many hours.
Secondly, this one file is constantly changing. This has implications with backing up, both when using time machine/time capsule or just a manual copy of files to external storage.
I chose to use Entourage because it provides the most complete integration with Exchange for mail/contacts/calendar, but that doesn’t mean you have to keep your email in Entourage when you’re archiving.
When I’d had enough of rebuilding the database every week I looked for an archive mechanism. Wanting to keep this archive searchable I need to keep as much email as possible local on my machine. I was using Apple Mail for personal email, so I decided to try to add a work archive account there. This would solve both the size of my Entourage database by me moving mail away and as Apple Mail uses small files for messages it meant that the backup issue was minimised considerably also.
There are a couple of ways to move email from Entourage to Apple Mail. In the Mail import wizard screen (go to File menu, then import mailboxes) you have the option to go directly from Entourage. This then connects to Entourage locally and lists the local folders, select the ones you want and they are imported. This has worked for smaller folders (sub 1000 emails), but with large folders I have found it to only import part of the mail. The best option I have found is to use the mbox format option. Starting in Entourage you can simply drag the folder you want to archive to a folder or your desktop, this creates an mbox file. Then in the Apple Mail import wizard you can select “Files in mbox format”, locate the mbox file you’ve just dragged from Entourage and they will be imported. I’ve tested this with folders containing 8000+ emails and it works well.
So, now I have some email being filtered in to folders on the Exchange server, some email makes it to my inbox. I move the email from my inbox in to folders when I’m done with it. When the folders get full (or if I’m lazy and the Exchange server size limit is reached) I then archive the folders to mbox before importing in to Apple Mail. This archiving takes no time at all, a 5-10 minute process every couple of weeks.
I’m not yet using Outlook for Mac, but am keen to see if that can add anything additional to streamlining archiving.
My must have filter rules
Finally, I thought I’d leave you with some filter rules that I strongly recommend you implement to reduce some unwanted email and also save your sanity. These filters are very easy to setup in Outlook (unfortunately you can’t do this through Entourage).
- Delete Out of office replies sent to mailing lists – if you send an email to an individual then you’ll probably be interested to know if they are away, if you send an email to a discussion group with 1000 people on it then, unless your IT department has setup the mail server well, you’re likely to get a bunch of out of office replies from people you never even knew existed. A simple rule could say “if subject = <out of office format>, and to = <discussion group mail address> then delete”.
- Don’t file meeting requests sent to discussions groups – these you’ll probably want to see in your inbox in case you need to attend. Exchange has an option to allow you to select message type as meeting request, then tell it not to move it to a folder.
- Get rid of the automated email ASAP – repetitive system generated emails are often a complete waste of time, and you’ll unlikely need to read every one of them as they come in. When you notice an email more than a couple of times, make a note of the sender/subject line and then write a filter.
Happy emailing!
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