My Email Travails

siddhesh@iitb.ernet.in... that was my first email address. I read emails through a cute little email application called something I cannot recollect. I felt proud every time I got an email.

That was 1996.

Today, like everyone else in this "connected" world, I have a love hate relationship with email. I use it to get most of my work done, and I also waste most of my time awake on it.

But it's not all been downhill. I have tried various approaches to email management, with some measure of success. This longish blog post is an attempt to share some of those learnings and experiences with you in the hope that it helps you too!

Shift to Outlook. My first real email client on the job was Netscape. It allowed me seamless access to our newsgroups (which Outlook didn't do), and since all the email folders were treated just like file folders on disk, taking backups, moving folders around and so on was fast, easy and intuitive.

But after fighting the move to Outlook for a couple of years, I succumbed and migrated to Outlook as my email client. Reason: a better integration with tasks, contacts and calendar.

For you, dear reader, this is irrelevant - and I am assuming you are already on Outlook and Exchange. If not, well, time to get there :) If you still insist on continuing with whatever else you use, well, feel free to drop off at this point.

Set up your folders. Creating a good folder structure can be deceptively tricky! Many of us lesser mortals succumb to the lure of the email filter, setting up dozens of them - for every friend, for every project, for every team mate. What could be simpler and easier than mails that obediently sort themselves out and sit in fodlers waiting for you to discover them?

Unless you have the IQ of a potted plant, you would have already figured this out yourself. Instead of processing an inbox, you now end up with dozens of them. Mails intended to go into a project folder go into your team mate friend's personal folder. You miss the important stuff from your boss because it gets auto-filtered into one of those dozen folders you are trying to track. And you process mails completely out of order in which they arrived, answering to older mails in a conversation long after newer ones have arrived! Not exactly the best way, right?

Keep the processing disciplined. I follow a very simple, but extremely effective mail processing workflow. All mails stay, unfiltered, in my inbox. Sorted on time of arrival. Only rarely, very rarely, a filter is employed to segregate mails, like for example, those that need no or very, very specific processing... mails from MIS, for example. All mails stay "unread" until I have processed them - giving me an easy way to figure out how much mail is sitting unread.

When I get down to processing mails, a quick first level processing takes place... based on the subject, or the content, if I realise a mail is of no consequence or need for the future, it gets deleted - never to be seen again. This "glance" typically takes 1-2 seconds per mail. No keeping around mails simply because I have disk space. If the mail needs a quick reply, or is urgent and can be processed immediately, I do it. Mostly a dozen words or less per mail. In the rare case that a mail is a call for action and needs more work, it stays right there - in the inbox, until I get down to processing it. Again, no missing a mail because I read it and lost it in one of the "folders". After a mail has thus been deleted, processed or delayed processed, it then goes into one of the "Saved" folders, or gets deleted never to be seen again.

Now you are free to set up the "Saved" hierarchy any way you want,s but I recommend that office stuff be classified into projects (NOT people), and only personal stuff be sorted by people. If you are in the habit of forwarding jokes and other stuff, keep separate folders for them and don't let them get mixed with other "personal" mails by people. The last thing you really need is to have a dinner invite, an adult joke and a project status report all sitting in the same folder!

A quick word the PSTs. Having different folders is one thing, having multiple PSTs quite another. A PST can support hundreds of folders, but again, I recommend you maintain multiple PSTs. When a large project ends, for example, move the mails into a separate PST, close it and banish it to your archives. A bloated PST slows down Outlook. The tighter you can keep it, the better.

Keep it minimal. It is easy to get carried away and end up with Gigs of mail very quickly. Use some simple rules to control the size of your inbox. Save only the last mail in a long conversation. You have the whole thread and the redundant mails can be safely deleted. As far as possible, avoid saving mails with large attachments, stuff like screenshots and documents sent to you for review.

Make the best use of your Exchange Server quota. Unless you work for Google, you probably have a limited disk quota on the mail server. It becomes critical, therefore, that you "pop" mails on your desktop/laptop and not leave copies on the server, using the "local email folder" setup in Outlook. But with today's smartphones making email processing much easier and faster on the move, how do you ensure you fulfil the conflicting requirements of popping mails with leaving them on the server for your mobile to get access to? I struggled with this for quite some time. On the move, I had access to email on the phone from the server. But, as soon I went online with my laptop, all mails popped into my laptop's local inbox, removing them from the server. The problem arose when I had a large stack of emails to be processed, and ended up going online inadvertently, thus making it impossible for me to access them on the road.

Worse, managing calendars became a major headache. Once you pop invites, appointments get onto your local calendar. If you accept invites on the server, the appointments get into the server calendar. I ended up having two separate calenders, and managing them became a nightmare. Accepting a meeting reschedule on the server, when the original meeting had found its way into my local calendar, for example, ended up creating a new meeting on the server, leaving the older meeting on the local calendar! There's no easy way to sync up both calendars automatically.

Then one day, it hit me. And it was so simple, it was no surprise I had completely missed it!

Inbox on server, archive locally. Now, my default email folder is the server folder, not a local folder on my laptop. My inbox stays on the server. When I send or delete mails, they stay on the server, and hence, are accessible on the phone at all times. Only my "Saved" folders are local. Yes, the Gigs of mail I save are NOT available on the phone, but that's perfectly fine. All my latest, unprocessed email is there, and that's all I need 99.99% of the time. The 0.01% can be done when I am on my laptop anyway. The only inconvenience is having to clean the server trash can and the sent box more often than I would need to when these mails accumulated in the local folders.

Even better, calendar management is now a breeze. Since all the invites get processed only on the server, there is now a single calendar, always available and synced up with my cell. So are all my contacts and tasks.

Did I mention that Windows Mango does a phenomenal job of syncing your email, contacts, appointments and everything else between your Exchange Server and your phone? If you are a serious business user, you got to try it! That device will simplify life to a large extent!

If you have read until here, there's a good chance you have suffered heavily from email deluge, and I hope my tips help you take back control. Do write in with your experiences!