I wish somebody in our comany is going to start looking into this huge problem of high volume email blasts. Each day I get system notifications, operations alerts, sales pitches from existing and/or unknown vendors with huge file attachments, somebody's action-required-from-you email, spam, etc, totally 50 - 100 junks per day. We are "still" using Lotus email and many of us have exceeded mailbox size quota, we can no longer save sent email automatically so we bcc copies to ourselves "luckily" because inbox size policy is to be tolerant, this creates even bigger mailboxes.
Not that we don't delete or archive emails. Archived emails are stored in local workstation and there is no way to retrieve old mails when needed during our business trips or at home. Also, once you start to archive your inbox, Lotus archives all your working folders including things you filed for futher processing and still need to stay close with, so this de-motivates us from archiving. All in all, email becomes a place to accumulate mental pressure and missing important to-dos. It is a daily frustration I can't do anything about it and have nobody to turn to.
Anyway, my personal mailbox with mac.com and gmail are a lot more manageable because nowadays cheap storage means you never need to worry about mailbox problems, all you need to do is have a system/practice to process things. 43 Folders' Merlin Mann recently gave a talk to Google Tech Talk on action-based email in relation to GTD concept. As email became one of the most important place where "input" according to David Allen is accumulated, it is to be managed and Merlin proposed a systematic way to look at it. No matter how trivial you may think, some of the advices in the video may help to alleviate email related migrain in long term.
Read and post comments | Send to a friend
