Good E-mail Habits

This week, I present to you a montage of short tips on how to keep your e-mail inbox manageable and functional.

1. Don't use your Deleted Items folder as a place to store messages that you actually want.

I'm not entirely sure why people do this -- it's sort of like storing important paperwork in the trashcan under your desk. Sooner or later, one of the maintenance guys is going to come around and empty the trash can. Now what? See #2 for a better solution.

2. The best thing to do is create mail folders for you to store messages you need to keep...and I mean lots of folders!

Do this by right-clicking in Outlook's left-hand pane on Mailbox - [Your Name] (for me it's "Mailbox - Martin, Greg") and selecting New Folder.... Type in the name you want to give it and click OK. I really recommend that you make lots of folders. That will make it easy to keep things organized, and easier to find messages you no longer need when it's time to clean things out.

3. Once you've stopped doing what's described in Tip #1, enable automatic Deleted Items emptying.

To do this, go to Tools and click on Options. Click on the Other tab. Now put a check mark next to Empty the Deleted Items folder upon exiting. Click OK. Now, every time you close Outlook (presumably at the end of your work day), Outlook will prompt you if it's okay to empty the wastebasket. You just click Yes when it does this and Outlook will take care of the rest.

4. If you've got hundreds or even thousands of messages in your Inbox, it's time to sort and delete. But don't fret: it's easier than you think.

If you have an ungodly amount of mail in your inbox, the odds are you've got a lot of stuff in there you don't even want.

Here's an easy way to sort those things out. In your Inbox, you'll see a beige bar above all the messages with the e-mail header categories: From, Subject, Received, Size, Flag, etc. These are actually buttons. Click on From or Subject. Now, all of your messages are sorted by either the sender or the subject line. This is very handy, because now all old "Weekly Memo" messages and "Schedule for this week" messages and other outdated mass e-mails are grouped together. It's now easy to just select all those messages that are grouped together and hit the Delete key.

Once that's done, you can also easily file away stuff with everything sorted by sender or subject line. For instance, if a particular person sends you a file (e.g. a summary .DOC file) every week or every month, it should be easy to see all those messages from that one person grouped together. In one motion, you can now select all those messages and drag them into a folder specially-created for these messages.

Once you've weeded out a lot of the junk this way, click the beige Received to return your view to the way it was originally. (If your oldest messages are at the top, click on Received again to reverse the sort order.)

5. Mailbox quotas/limits are based on aggregate message size, not the quantity of messages.

If you're often receiving automated "Mailbox Full" messages, it's not because you have too many e-mails. It's because you have too many large e-mails. In other words, you have too many e-mails with attachments.

What's the solution? Simple. Save the attachments to a folder and then delete the e-mails. To do this, open up the e-mail that has the attachment, go to File, and click Save Attachments.... If there are multiple attachments, you'll see a small dialog box open up listing all the attached files. Click OK. Now navigate to the folder where you want all the attached files to go and click OK. (Save the attachments in your My Documents folder if you need them for yourself; save them to a network folder if you need multiple people to access them.) Done! Now you can delete that large e-mail!

Also, don't forget to check your Sent Items folder for messages with attachments! This folder is the biggest culprit for accumulating large messages that you don't need.