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Business News/ News / Business Of Life/  Be the boss of your email inbox
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Be the boss of your email inbox

Is your inbox inundated? Have people stopped replying to your mails? Take note of our eight tips

Illustration: Raajan/MintPremium
Illustration: Raajan/Mint

OTHERS :

Email is incredibly helpful, easy to use and versatile. Unfortunately, it has also remained essentially unchanged for nearly a decade, frustratingly inefficient and hard to manage.

We keep getting many newsletters and group messages we don’t want in our email inboxes, and some that we do want. We’re also trying to use the inbox to send important documents to colleagues, and share links to funny YouTube videos among friends. And in all this, email is also used for actual mail.

Thanks to all this, your inbox can become a bit of a mess, and you might not realize it, but some of your own outgoing mails might be making things worse for others. So we’ve got a set of four tips to take care of your own account, and four more to help you be a good email sender.

MASTER YOUR INBOX

Remove yourself from unnecessary mailing lists

Spam used to be a major problem, but email services are pretty good at handling it today. The various services and newsletters that you signed up for are not spam, but they’re still clogging up your inbox needlessly. You could open each mail and hunt for the unsubscribe button, but a much easier option is to use Unroll.me.

Using it is simple—just sign in with either your Gmail or Yahoo account, and it’ll scan your inbox to detect newsletters, letting you opt out with a single click. It also locates the LinkedIn and Facebook settings pages for you. Unroll.me is free to use, but after you unsubscribe from four mailing lists, you need to post about Unroll.me on one of your social networks to continue using it.

Bacn is the new spam

There’s spam and ham—the mail you want— and then there’s bacn—email you subscribed to, but don’t want to read right now. It could be a newsletter from a favourite site, or your alumni email group; something you want to read at your own convenience, not delete right away.

Dealing with bacn is pretty simple if you’re using Gmail—enable the Smartlabels lab (Gmail’s experimental options, which are still being tested) in the Labs tab of Settings and it will automatically create labels for these mails, clearing them away for later. Otherwise, you can also set up filters manually to deal with mails you want for later—this will work for all mail providers, not just Gmail.

Get smarter email

If you’re using Gmail, then you need to use Rapportive. It’s a free add-on that you can install for your browser, and it’s a great tool to add to your inbox. It shows you social information about the person you are mailing on the right side, next to the mailbox.

You can reply to tweets or follow people on Twitter right from Gmail. A glance at the sidebar will tell you their designation and role in the company, thanks to LinkedIn, and their Facebook status might give you a clue about their mood before you send that mail.

Take manual control of your inbox

One of the easiest tools for managing your inbox is AquaMail, a free Andriod app. Just install it and enter your login credentials, and the app builds a smart inbox, scanning for mails that need urgent responses, and allowing extremely powerful sorting options. You could sort by the date, or show messages with attachments first, or show them by sender, allowing you to find important mails easily.

Aquamail is free, but allows you to connect to only two accounts, and includes a line about AquaMail in the signature. To add more accounts (and remove the ad), you can buy the paid version for 261.

STREAMLINE YOUR EMAIL

Cut down on attachments

If you’re sharing Word documents that people edit and mail back, then you’re wasting a lot of bandwidth and creating multiple versions of files, which is definitely going to lead to a mix-up somewhere down the line. Attachments were very useful, but today, cloud storage means you can just send a link instead. Dropbox, and other similar services like Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive, let you share files and collaborate with others without wasting bandwidth. Not only is that more efficient, it also makes it easier for people to see your emails instead of stalling their entire email queue for half an hour while Microsoft Outlook struggles with your presentation.

Stop attaching images in a signature

There’s a trend to include your company logo in emails these days. And it does look nice, sometimes. Not all the time though, and it wastes bandwidth. Worse, the image shows up as an attachment, so when you’re looking for that one file that someone did send over email, and you search for mails with attachments, you get a lot of useless junk in your search results. Instead, just include details like your company name or address in simple text—it’s useful and efficient.

Use ‘cc’ and ‘bcc’ properly

If it’s a work discussion, you should ideally be using “cc" (carbon copy). Mark the person who has to give a response in To, and mark others who might have useful inputs with a “cc". That’s not to say that the “bcc" (blind carbon copy) field isn’t useful—suppose you need to broadcast a message to a lot of recipients, then “bcc" is much more useful. Not only does it prevent the conversation from becoming a free for all, there’s the added advantage of being able to see the mail quickly, without having to wade through several lines of “To" and “cc" entries.

Avoid rich formatting

It’s not always possible to avoid using rich text formatting in emails. But all the effort you put into formatting a letter will be lost if you’re sending it to someone who has set their email client to plain text view.

The formatting is also used to insert images, colours and backgrounds, and this should be avoided at all costs. If the text needs an image to explain it, then just put up a Dropbox link to a PDF file. If the text needs to be in different colours to understand, then you should probably consider a rewrite, or send a Dropbox link to a DOC file. There’s no reason to turn someone else’s inbox into a multihued rainbow, which can be jarring to read, and if there are images, also waste bandwidth and storage space.

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Published: 04 Jun 2013, 07:41 PM IST
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