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Taming the E-mail Beast

Here’s what I do. What do you do?

April 2008 By Denny Hatch
14

In the News

Struggling to Evade the E-Mail Tsunami
E-MAIL has become the bane of some people’s professional lives. Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering new Internet companies, last month stared balefully at his inbox, with 2,433 unread e-mail messages, not counting 721 messages awaiting his attention in Facebook. Mr. Arrington might be tempted to purge his inbox and start afresh—the phrase “e-mail bankruptcy” has been with us since at least 2002. But he declares e-mail bankruptcy regularly, to no avail. New messages swiftly replace those that are deleted unread. For most of us who are not prominent bloggers, our inbox, thankfully, will never become quite so crowded, at least with nonspam messages. But it doesn’t take all that many to seem overwhelming—for me, the sight of two dozen messages awaiting individual responses makes me perspire.
—Randall Stross, The New York Times, April 20, 2008
“Feed the e-mail beast. We all do it, from the time we log on in the morning till late in the day when a last thought needs to be shared with a colleague or friend,” wrote Paul McDougall and Elena Malykhina on InformationWeek.com in 2006. “We’re sending messaging morsels over mobile devices to try to satiate its insatiable appetite. Don’t feed the beast—take off a week, a day, even an hour—and you fall dangerously behind.”

Sherry Turkle, Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, once had 2,500 unread e-mails in her inbox and declared “e-mail bankruptcy.” She told everyone on her e-mail list that she had not responded and to contact her again if it were important. And then she deleted it all. It was she who reportedly coined the phrase “e-mail bankruptcy” back in 1999.

“It’s a metaphor for basically reassessing where your e-mail habit has taken you,” Turkle told CTV in Canada, “and what you need to do to get it under control.”

Readers of this cranky little e-zine know that if they send in a comment—whether for publication or privately—they will always get a personal reply from me unless they send the wrong return address.

When I told my wife, Peggy, how I deal with e-mail, she told me I was doing it all wrong.

If you have a better system, I (and your fellow readers) would sure like to hear it.

A Liberating Experience
I loved having a one-line address: dennyhatch@aol.com. Just 17 characters and a dot was all that was needed to reach me 24/7 through any Internet portal in the world.

Then I heard a recording of Vincent Ferrari, who tried to cancel his AOL account and the AOL rep refused. The conversation got ugly and turned into a PR catastrophe for AOL, one from which the company never really recovered. (If you’ve forgotten this exercise in marketing sleaze, see the hyperlink below.) I opened a Yahoo! account, and an amazing thing happened: My inbox was suddenly manageable. Instead of hundreds of e-mails a day, I was getting 20 to 30.

Since then, the count has picked up. But it is nothing to the crap flooding my AOL account.

I still keep the AOL account, now that it, too, is free. This is a backup in case Yahoo! goes bust. And even though the account has not been active for nearly two years, I still get roughly 200 e-mails a day, which I scan and delete in about 30 seconds.

Takeaway Points to Consider:

* Never leave an e-mail in your inbox for later action if you can possibly help it. If you do, you are forcing your brain to do duplicate work.

* If your e-mail account is getting out of hand, switch to another provider and send news of the change to your nearest and dearest colleagues, friends and family only. It is truly liberating! In fact, you may want to switch providers once every couple of years.

* I have a desktop computer and a laptop—both Apples. I back up everything on an external hard drive once a week and transfer the entire contents of the backup drive to the laptop. When I travel, the laptop becomes the master computer.

* On the road, I deal with e-mail just as I do in the home office. I seldom go to bed with e-mail in my inbox.

* When opening my e-mail inbox, I click on the box at the top that checks every e-mail. In scanning the day’s mail, I delete the check marks on those few e-mails where I recognize the sender’s name or the subject line is of interest.

* Generally, more than 90% of my e-mail is deleted without reading it.

* I do everything possible to avoid dealing with an e-mail more than once.

* I do not trust computers. Every day I back up new stuff on a flash drive.

* Once a week I back up everything on the external hard drive and transfer it all to the laptop. This gives me three complete sets of identical data. If disaster strikes, I can always grab my laptop and be back in business from anywhere in the world.

Web Sites Related to Today's Edition:

Sherry Turkle and E-mail Bankruptcy
http://tinyurl.com/3ery6t

Mike Musgrove of The Washington Post on E-mail Bankruptcy
http://tinyurl.com/3xl4qc

How Mark Cuban Manages His E-mail
http://tinyurl.com/5fdtlt

“Struggling to Evade the E-mail Tsunami,” The New York Times
http://tinyurl.com/6yzs92

Vincent Ferrari Tries to Cancel His AOL account: Audio
http://media.putfile.com/AOL-Cancellation

Vincent Ferrari v AOL: Transcript
http://www.nbc10.com/news/9406462/detail.html
 

Companies Mentioned:
14

COMMENTS

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Comment *
Most Recent Comments:
Jim - Posted on April 29, 2008
Having been an e-mail user for approaching 20 (yikes!) years, here are a couple of rules I?ve come to live by:

* I work off of my Inbox (in Outlook) as the closest thing I have to a ?things to do? list. I work very hard to keep this to one screen of messages (which, means pending/in-process tasks). When messages start to scroll off, it?s time to buckle down and jam out some work, delegate some things to others, or simply decide that some things ain?t ever gonna get done?in the latter case, that?s the signal to delete ?em.

* Some folks spend a lot of time moving messages into ingenious, nuanced multi-level e-mail folder structures. With the great search tools now available, though, why bother? I simply keep all of my Deleted Items as long as I can spare the space (usually a year or so) and my Sent Items forever. When I need something, I just go searching my entire Deleted Items or Sent Items for what I?m looking for and I nearly always find it in a few second with only one or two queries?no time spent sorting things I may (actually, likely will) never need again.
Aryeh - Posted on April 29, 2008
Denny:

Lots of people find their productivity is inversely related to their email use. I limit myself to a handful of e-zines (including yours, of course) and I try not to check my email more than twice a day unless I'm expecting something important.

When I really have to be productive, I move to a room with no PC.
Alison Taylor - Posted on April 29, 2008
Denny, I would love you to do a story on what people think about texting. For some people, Text Messaging is getting just as unmanageable as email. I think more people should take a break from it all and pick up the phone - or better yet - go and visit someone and have "face time"!!!!! Too many young people today are absolutely brilliant when it comes to technology but so socially dysfunctional, it's sad. Case in point:friend's daughter who I thought was a complete airhead in person - shy, couldn't express herself when she did talk, seemed awkward and terrified to be around strangers. I read a term paper of hers (for psychology! how ironic!) and was stunned - the girl is smart and thoughtful. But I worry how she will progress in life outside of high school. She can hardly keep her hands off her cell phone or her computer.
mary - Posted on April 29, 2008
I used to get around 200 junk emails a day, now get almost none. My only emails are from "authorized users". I subscribed to SpamArrest, which has filtered out 99% of all the junk. Costs $24/year. Well worth every penny.
Lee Grey - Posted on April 29, 2008
This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. Several years ago, I was so inundated with email that I was panicky about leaving for a trip down the Colorado River, for fear that my then 10MB inbox would fill up, and I would then lose important email from customers. (Today, inbox space is rarely as scarce a resource as time.)

In an effort to stem the tide, I devised a system that counters the major flaws in today's email technology. No longer am I dependent upon spam filters or forced to open new email accounts in order to keep my inbox under control.

The bottom line is that you need to put an "email router" between yourself and the people who wish to email you. Then, you have a say in what reaches you and can easily shut down any sender who becomes a spammer (or gets their database hacked, sells their list to spammers, etc.). A key precept of this system is that you never give out the email address where you pick up your email. That way, all email has to pass through your router before dropping into your inbox. It's amazingly effective.

I'll be looking for beta testers for a turn-key version of this that includes software to make it simple to manage within a few days.

Lee Grey
http://www.maileable.com
Jerry - Posted on April 29, 2008
Denny,

I usually enjoy your e-zine & this last issue on e-mail is no exception. You & I handle e-mail similarly but you are way more organized -- I may borrow some of your process.

Yet, there are two technical issues for me:

1. Link at the top does not work -- that is clicking does nothing: Having problems viewing this newsletter? Click here: http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/bcs/enews/

2. Nearly every issue has some printing problem. Lately print shows the mast head on a page, then one full page, then a slew of blank pages until the disclosure at the end. I often print longer pieces because I dislike reading on the screen & usually reserve this kind of reading for after-hours. When I want to hold onto an issue I usually save as a pdf -- that's a printing function & has the same problem.
John Friesen - Posted on April 29, 2008
Email... aagghh! A boon and a curse. In gmail I do as you do with the checkboxes. But in Thunderbird, I simply apply a junk-mail filter and delete all the labelled junk without even looking at it. Periodically I scan my junk mail folder to see if anybody important is being junked. Like your consultant correspondent, I tend to use various folders to file things in, but I'm increasingly of a mind to simply delete everything more than 6 months old. Damn the legal consequences!
Ann - Posted on April 29, 2008
I would be interested to hear a lawyer's opinion on whether or not saving emails into word files would stand up in court. What would prevent me form just typing up a completely fabricated repsonse, well after the fact, and putting an artificial date on the "correspondence"? I may be missing something here, but where is the proof the correspondence actually sent?
Anne C - Posted on April 29, 2008
Denny: Thanks once again for a great topic and insights into how you and other people handle this tsunami.

Like you, I began my cyber journey with AOL and was a huge fan for many years. Like you, I got sick and tired of all the crap -- and the cost -- and moved to Yahoo!

On Yahoo I do the exact same thing you do (clicking delete all and then being selective about retaining).

Alas, I currently have 1216 emails in my inbox (and thousands in various folders). That's because as a consultant I use my email account as my file cabinet because I don't want to print everything out to retain (saving trees, cheap about ink). Yes, I do back up once a week on a zip drive but it's such a hassle to locate something completed 6 months ago so...

Guess I'm a "belt and suspenders" kind of a person...any cure you can offer, please let me know!

Best,
Anne
John Vinokur - Posted on April 29, 2008
Denny,

I don't know if this is too obvious a comment to make, but *you* didn't mention it - so I will.

You suggested (both in the body of your article and in the "Takeaway Points" postscript) that one should switch to another [email account] provider every couple of years, just to clear away the deadwood.

Well, why go to all that trouble? Just open - and start exclusively using - a new account every once in a while with the SAME provider, and you will have accomplished exactly the same purpose.
No invoicing or billing changes (if the provider charges), but the same desired effect!

For example, instead of continuing with "dennyhatch@provider.com", start using "dhatch@provider.com", or even "dhatch999@provider.com"; no fuss, no bother.

JV
JL - Posted on April 29, 2008
Google Desktop really helps with searches through massive amounts of email, including deleted items.
Jim Lanahan - Posted on April 29, 2008
Your E-Zine is great for marketing/business insight. I look forward to receiving it each week. This one is a waste of time. Stick to your strengths and stay away from computer application lessons.
bilou - Posted on April 29, 2008
In the same way that people have various mailing addresses (home, work, additional PO boxes) and phone numbers (home, work, cell, fax), I have multiple e-mail addresses that all serve various functions.

Many people are incredulous when I reply, ?I have ten e-mail addresses.? Of course, I have noticed that the amount of shock is typically directly proportional to one?s age.

My e-mail addresses? functions serve as basic personal, day job, listserve subscriptions (social/political activism), job search/professional society, ?other job?/consulting, etc. Studies have shown that the average person now has three e-mail addresses: work, home and a ?throwaway? address that they use as a potential dumping ground for spam, when e-mail is a required ?registration? field, etc.

(I also give out myob@aol.com as a dummy field occasionally, if I don?t care about receiving information back, just as I offer the telephone number of the remote access number to my voice mail to people I am writing a check to in a store.)

I don?t check each address everyday, but this segmentation works quite well. Some are AOL, some are Yahoo, and some are others. Sorting by address or subject doesn?t necessarily segment well enough, and if you don?t live in a world where you receive literally hundreds or a thousand e-mails in a month?you will. Once that occurs, this system will be a pretty good way to deal with that. Looking ahead, how else would you plan for the inevitable?
Rebecca - Posted on April 29, 2008
Denny,

This was an interesting "inside look" at what one of the most well-known people in the direct marketing industry does with his inbox.

I agree on most parts, however I save my emails in folders within outlook based on whether or not I may have to go back to them in the future sometime (i.e. similar to your file from your non-profit organization friend). We call it the "CYA" file (Cover your Ass). That way it is easy to prove that I did send something at a specific time, etc.

Another thing to mention is sometimes I will send a casual email out to a couple dozen friends or family members (i.e. we just just got a new dog, here are some pictures). But I use BCC. This feature of email is probably the one feature that should be used MORE but is rarely used. I don't have a mass email list either, and usually delete emails from my friends that come in that form.

Please tell everyone to use BCC when appropriate. It is the best function/feature!!

Thanks
Rebecca :)
www.purifyyourbody.com
Click here to view archived comments...
Archived Comments:
Jim - Posted on April 29, 2008
Having been an e-mail user for approaching 20 (yikes!) years, here are a couple of rules I?ve come to live by:

* I work off of my Inbox (in Outlook) as the closest thing I have to a ?things to do? list. I work very hard to keep this to one screen of messages (which, means pending/in-process tasks). When messages start to scroll off, it?s time to buckle down and jam out some work, delegate some things to others, or simply decide that some things ain?t ever gonna get done?in the latter case, that?s the signal to delete ?em.

* Some folks spend a lot of time moving messages into ingenious, nuanced multi-level e-mail folder structures. With the great search tools now available, though, why bother? I simply keep all of my Deleted Items as long as I can spare the space (usually a year or so) and my Sent Items forever. When I need something, I just go searching my entire Deleted Items or Sent Items for what I?m looking for and I nearly always find it in a few second with only one or two queries?no time spent sorting things I may (actually, likely will) never need again.
Aryeh - Posted on April 29, 2008
Denny:

Lots of people find their productivity is inversely related to their email use. I limit myself to a handful of e-zines (including yours, of course) and I try not to check my email more than twice a day unless I'm expecting something important.

When I really have to be productive, I move to a room with no PC.
Alison Taylor - Posted on April 29, 2008
Denny, I would love you to do a story on what people think about texting. For some people, Text Messaging is getting just as unmanageable as email. I think more people should take a break from it all and pick up the phone - or better yet - go and visit someone and have "face time"!!!!! Too many young people today are absolutely brilliant when it comes to technology but so socially dysfunctional, it's sad. Case in point:friend's daughter who I thought was a complete airhead in person - shy, couldn't express herself when she did talk, seemed awkward and terrified to be around strangers. I read a term paper of hers (for psychology! how ironic!) and was stunned - the girl is smart and thoughtful. But I worry how she will progress in life outside of high school. She can hardly keep her hands off her cell phone or her computer.
mary - Posted on April 29, 2008
I used to get around 200 junk emails a day, now get almost none. My only emails are from "authorized users". I subscribed to SpamArrest, which has filtered out 99% of all the junk. Costs $24/year. Well worth every penny.
Lee Grey - Posted on April 29, 2008
This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. Several years ago, I was so inundated with email that I was panicky about leaving for a trip down the Colorado River, for fear that my then 10MB inbox would fill up, and I would then lose important email from customers. (Today, inbox space is rarely as scarce a resource as time.)

In an effort to stem the tide, I devised a system that counters the major flaws in today's email technology. No longer am I dependent upon spam filters or forced to open new email accounts in order to keep my inbox under control.

The bottom line is that you need to put an "email router" between yourself and the people who wish to email you. Then, you have a say in what reaches you and can easily shut down any sender who becomes a spammer (or gets their database hacked, sells their list to spammers, etc.). A key precept of this system is that you never give out the email address where you pick up your email. That way, all email has to pass through your router before dropping into your inbox. It's amazingly effective.

I'll be looking for beta testers for a turn-key version of this that includes software to make it simple to manage within a few days.

Lee Grey
http://www.maileable.com
Jerry - Posted on April 29, 2008
Denny,

I usually enjoy your e-zine & this last issue on e-mail is no exception. You & I handle e-mail similarly but you are way more organized -- I may borrow some of your process.

Yet, there are two technical issues for me:

1. Link at the top does not work -- that is clicking does nothing: Having problems viewing this newsletter? Click here: http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/bcs/enews/

2. Nearly every issue has some printing problem. Lately print shows the mast head on a page, then one full page, then a slew of blank pages until the disclosure at the end. I often print longer pieces because I dislike reading on the screen & usually reserve this kind of reading for after-hours. When I want to hold onto an issue I usually save as a pdf -- that's a printing function & has the same problem.
John Friesen - Posted on April 29, 2008
Email... aagghh! A boon and a curse. In gmail I do as you do with the checkboxes. But in Thunderbird, I simply apply a junk-mail filter and delete all the labelled junk without even looking at it. Periodically I scan my junk mail folder to see if anybody important is being junked. Like your consultant correspondent, I tend to use various folders to file things in, but I'm increasingly of a mind to simply delete everything more than 6 months old. Damn the legal consequences!
Ann - Posted on April 29, 2008
I would be interested to hear a lawyer's opinion on whether or not saving emails into word files would stand up in court. What would prevent me form just typing up a completely fabricated repsonse, well after the fact, and putting an artificial date on the "correspondence"? I may be missing something here, but where is the proof the correspondence actually sent?
Anne C - Posted on April 29, 2008
Denny: Thanks once again for a great topic and insights into how you and other people handle this tsunami.

Like you, I began my cyber journey with AOL and was a huge fan for many years. Like you, I got sick and tired of all the crap -- and the cost -- and moved to Yahoo!

On Yahoo I do the exact same thing you do (clicking delete all and then being selective about retaining).

Alas, I currently have 1216 emails in my inbox (and thousands in various folders). That's because as a consultant I use my email account as my file cabinet because I don't want to print everything out to retain (saving trees, cheap about ink). Yes, I do back up once a week on a zip drive but it's such a hassle to locate something completed 6 months ago so...

Guess I'm a "belt and suspenders" kind of a person...any cure you can offer, please let me know!

Best,
Anne
John Vinokur - Posted on April 29, 2008
Denny,

I don't know if this is too obvious a comment to make, but *you* didn't mention it - so I will.

You suggested (both in the body of your article and in the "Takeaway Points" postscript) that one should switch to another [email account] provider every couple of years, just to clear away the deadwood.

Well, why go to all that trouble? Just open - and start exclusively using - a new account every once in a while with the SAME provider, and you will have accomplished exactly the same purpose.
No invoicing or billing changes (if the provider charges), but the same desired effect!

For example, instead of continuing with "dennyhatch@provider.com", start using "dhatch@provider.com", or even "dhatch999@provider.com"; no fuss, no bother.

JV
JL - Posted on April 29, 2008
Google Desktop really helps with searches through massive amounts of email, including deleted items.
Jim Lanahan - Posted on April 29, 2008
Your E-Zine is great for marketing/business insight. I look forward to receiving it each week. This one is a waste of time. Stick to your strengths and stay away from computer application lessons.
bilou - Posted on April 29, 2008
In the same way that people have various mailing addresses (home, work, additional PO boxes) and phone numbers (home, work, cell, fax), I have multiple e-mail addresses that all serve various functions.

Many people are incredulous when I reply, ?I have ten e-mail addresses.? Of course, I have noticed that the amount of shock is typically directly proportional to one?s age.

My e-mail addresses? functions serve as basic personal, day job, listserve subscriptions (social/political activism), job search/professional society, ?other job?/consulting, etc. Studies have shown that the average person now has three e-mail addresses: work, home and a ?throwaway? address that they use as a potential dumping ground for spam, when e-mail is a required ?registration? field, etc.

(I also give out myob@aol.com as a dummy field occasionally, if I don?t care about receiving information back, just as I offer the telephone number of the remote access number to my voice mail to people I am writing a check to in a store.)

I don?t check each address everyday, but this segmentation works quite well. Some are AOL, some are Yahoo, and some are others. Sorting by address or subject doesn?t necessarily segment well enough, and if you don?t live in a world where you receive literally hundreds or a thousand e-mails in a month?you will. Once that occurs, this system will be a pretty good way to deal with that. Looking ahead, how else would you plan for the inevitable?
Rebecca - Posted on April 29, 2008
Denny,

This was an interesting "inside look" at what one of the most well-known people in the direct marketing industry does with his inbox.

I agree on most parts, however I save my emails in folders within outlook based on whether or not I may have to go back to them in the future sometime (i.e. similar to your file from your non-profit organization friend). We call it the "CYA" file (Cover your Ass). That way it is easy to prove that I did send something at a specific time, etc.

Another thing to mention is sometimes I will send a casual email out to a couple dozen friends or family members (i.e. we just just got a new dog, here are some pictures). But I use BCC. This feature of email is probably the one feature that should be used MORE but is rarely used. I don't have a mass email list either, and usually delete emails from my friends that come in that form.

Please tell everyone to use BCC when appropriate. It is the best function/feature!!

Thanks
Rebecca :)
www.purifyyourbody.com