5 Filters to Help You Conquer Your Email Inbox

Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.

Depending on how you feel about it personally, email is everything from a wonderful and time-saving technological advance that has been nothing short of revolutionary in how we communicate, to a ridiculous waste of time, energy and sanity without any possible hope of ever being used productively.

However you feel about it, email has become unavoidable – we all use it (based on my scientific test – if my grandparents use it, everyone else must too), and it’s a source of incredible volume of communication. As of 2008, 2 million emails were sent every second. That’s nuts.

So love it or hate it, you’re probably not going to abandon email anytime soon. But you can make it more productive, and more useful.

Most email clients these days support filters – the automatic handling of messages with a certain name, or from a certain person, or by any other criteria you might imagine. For this post, I’ll use Gmail as an example, but the filters can be applied almost universally.

Here are five such filters that will get most of your email out of your inbox, get a lot of it out of your way, and help you make sure you’re dealing with what you need to – and only what you need to.

The goal here is to keep your inbox free of things that don’t need to be dealt with right now (or at all), and to get the rest into a place where you can easily find it – or easily ignore it.

Filter #1 – Subscriptions

Maybe you get emails from your favorite blogs (like this one, for instance) every morning. Odds are, you don’t read them, every morning, right as they come in. So create a filter of all messages from that blog, or to a particular address where you get all your updates (and not just blogs – newsletters, and anything else you’re signed up to receive regular updates from) into one particular folder (or label, for Gmail users). Check that folder once a day, or once every few days.

Filter #2 – Notifications

Are you on Facebook? How about Friendfeed? Twitter? For these networks and many others, odds are good you’re getting flooded with emails starting with “@monkeyfeces is following you…” or “Billy sent you a message…” Put those all in one place, and then batch-process them.

I like to wait until 50 pile up, and then crank through them in a few minutes. Your turnaround time doesn’t need to be fast with these notifications, so why leave them in the Inbox, where all they do is remind you of how much time you should be spending on Twitter?

Filter #3 – Pseudo-Spam

Spam, for the most part, is filtered out pretty well these days. But Pseudo-Spam, or Bacn, as some people call it, is not. For instance, if you buy concert tickets on Ticketmaster, you’re going to be forever inundated with emails from Ticketmaster telling you about all the other concerts you should want to go to. Instead of unsubscribing (which is usually a huge hassle), just filter all of these into a folder (I call mine Spamish).

I check that folder about once a month, and almost never find something of value. It gets filled with things from Apple, Ticketmaster, the New Jersey Nets, and a few other companies I’ve willingly given my email address, and now wish would go away.

Filter #4 – The A-List

Do you have, say, five people whose emails you ALWAYS answer in a timely manner? Bosses, spouses, best friends, and children all qualify here. Filter their email addresses into a folder marked “Important” or “A List.” Every time a new email pops into there, answer it right away.

Whenever you log in to your email, that’s where you go first – if nothing else gets done, at least you know you’ve dealt with the most important emails.

Filter #5-  Only to Me

This one’s for people who get a lot of “Reply All” emails, or lots of forwards that your friend thinks are hilarious but really aren’t. At all. Like, really, not funny. If that doesn’t describe you, I’m forever jealous. If it does, creating a filter to see emails sent only to your email address is pretty easy, and is a great way of weeding out things you probably don’t need to see right now anyway.

Odds are, if something is sent only to you, it’s more urgently in need of your attention – check this folder after the A-List, and make sure no one’s trying urgently to get in touch with you before you move on to all the emails saying “Thanks!” that for some reason needed to be sent to the whole company.

After applying these filters, I found that about 90% of my email never even reached my Inbox. I checked the A-List first (which included about 8 people – don’t have more than 10 or so), then the Only to Me list, then moved on to things that didn’t need my attention so quickly. It made dealing with email easier, and made prioritizing when I only had a second a no-brainer of a process.

Creating filters varies by email service, but can usually be done in a couple of ways. You can create a filter, and specify particular email addresses or words you want to include. Or, you can choose a message, and create a filter for messages like that one – perfect for notifications, Pseudo-Spam, and the like.

How do you manage all the email that comes into your inbox?

Photo: iStockPhoto

Liked the post? Share it with somebody!