A Tale of My Inbox
Do you use Gmail? This, of course, is Google's very popular web-based email application.
It's sturdy, reliable, and relatively easy to understand. But, like most email accounts, you can find yourself buried in a mountain of junk, with spam-that-is-not-spam hidden from view, and an unmanageable inbox very quickly.
Recently, out of desperation (the Mother of Invention, after all), I discovered a couple of nifty tricks that suddenly brought my inbox, and general mail management picture into focus.
It wasn't Gmail's much-touted "tabs," which I found useless, though I think if I took the time to set them up properly, they would be extremely useful. Your inbox can be organized into tabs - Google has default tabs that make sense to some developer at Google, but you can create your own based on your own needs. So, if you have both business and personal emails arriving at your inbox, you can divide them according to rules you set up; you can shunt the newsletters you actually want to read into one folder, and others you may or may not want to read or ditch into another.
Another option with Gmail is that you can have several accounts open at the same time! I didn't realize this, and for a long while, I would shut down one account to open another, and often found that I missed something important in the account that wasn't in use. Well, just go up to your photo in the upper right corner, and sign in to as many of your accounts - business or personal or whatever - as you have active.
The final trick was really useful. Often, as you deal with emails, some get buried deep in the junk you have not yet clean out from your inbox. I have learned to "mark as unread" an email that I do want to deal with, even if I can't do it right at that moment. However, those are the very emails that will often get pushed further and further down in the pile until I no longer see them. Poof! Gone. At least, from my awareness.
So, every day, I go up to the search bar and type in "in:unread", of course, without the quotes. Only my unread, inbox emails will appear.
So ideally, some combination of tabs, segregating email into accounts, and controlling my view of the inbox, will keep my mail management, er, manageable.
It's sturdy, reliable, and relatively easy to understand. But, like most email accounts, you can find yourself buried in a mountain of junk, with spam-that-is-not-spam hidden from view, and an unmanageable inbox very quickly.
Recently, out of desperation (the Mother of Invention, after all), I discovered a couple of nifty tricks that suddenly brought my inbox, and general mail management picture into focus.
It wasn't Gmail's much-touted "tabs," which I found useless, though I think if I took the time to set them up properly, they would be extremely useful. Your inbox can be organized into tabs - Google has default tabs that make sense to some developer at Google, but you can create your own based on your own needs. So, if you have both business and personal emails arriving at your inbox, you can divide them according to rules you set up; you can shunt the newsletters you actually want to read into one folder, and others you may or may not want to read or ditch into another.
Another option with Gmail is that you can have several accounts open at the same time! I didn't realize this, and for a long while, I would shut down one account to open another, and often found that I missed something important in the account that wasn't in use. Well, just go up to your photo in the upper right corner, and sign in to as many of your accounts - business or personal or whatever - as you have active.
The final trick was really useful. Often, as you deal with emails, some get buried deep in the junk you have not yet clean out from your inbox. I have learned to "mark as unread" an email that I do want to deal with, even if I can't do it right at that moment. However, those are the very emails that will often get pushed further and further down in the pile until I no longer see them. Poof! Gone. At least, from my awareness.
So, every day, I go up to the search bar and type in "in:unread", of course, without the quotes. Only my unread, inbox emails will appear.
So ideally, some combination of tabs, segregating email into accounts, and controlling my view of the inbox, will keep my mail management, er, manageable.
Comments