Are you wasting your summer days with email overload?

It's summer and you want to go out and play. but instead, you're losing precious time struggling with your bulky email inbox.

InformationWeek has a roundup of a dozen tools that might give you some relief, just in time for the official start of summer on June 21...

Two more options for managing email

Thanks to John Brandon, in the September 2012 issue of INC magazine for this suggestion.

He has found two options to help you stop the time-drain that is known as email. We've all tried unsubscribing to newsletters, and avoiding getting locked in to daily updates, but still, we waste hours each day plowing through a full mailbox, just to get it down to a manageable number. And then, the next day, we start all over again. Yes, we all know its a losing battle.

John's suggestis are for inbox tools that might help:

Unroll.me  and SaneBox.

Unroll gives you a fast way to unsubscribe to all the sites that have you as a subscriber.

SaneBox is a fee-based service, $4.95/month, that analyzes your messages before delivery, to pre-sort by priority. The low-priority items are then summaried and pavailable for you to scan na single message.

If email continues to waste your time, try these or other resources to keep you from losing productive hours each week.

Tech time takes a big bite out of the day

Will Forsythe of the CEO Forum shared this analysis of the INC Magazine feature on the 500 fastest growing companies.

You might be surprised at how much of the day is eat up by tech, even at the highest levels in companies.

"Summary:  The average CEO worked an average 13-hour work day.  Since most CEOs I know work some hours on the weekend as well, I am assuming a 70-hour work week.

• 3 hours selling and talking to customers--23%
• 3 hours in meetings and talking with employees--23%
• 2 hours emailing--15%
• 5 hours other and misc.--39%"

At 2 hours per day, that's a minimum of 10 hours per week, or a full week of time each month.

Something to think about when you're short on time - like maybe let the email wait a while and spend your time in better ways?

Good or bad? Facebook adds email addresses

This from the Facebook Blog today:

Today I'm excited to announce the next evolution of Messages. You decide how you want to talk to your friends: via SMS, chat, email or Messages. They will receive your message through whatever medium or device is convenient for them, and you can both have a conversation in real time.  You shouldn't have to remember who prefers IM over email or worry about which technology to use.  Simply choose their name and type a message.

We are also providing an @facebook.com email address to every person on Facebook who wants one.

Now people can share with friends over email, whether they're on Facebook or not. To be clear, Messages is not email. There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key. We modeled it more closely to chat and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message.

Video Email ???

Oh, you knew this was coming... We know that email is one of the most used computer applications todoay, and we know typing text won't satify the multi-media nerds.

We know the feeling when we don't have time to wade through the Inbox, we keep reading email over and over, not having time to decide where to put it, whether to keep it, how to find it later, and afraid to just press "delete" to get back to an empty Inbox.

So, this innovation from Google is not likely to make things better -- A move toward convergence of all web junk into your Inbox??? Google says this new Buzz is "a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting and share updates, photos, videos and more. Buzz is built right into Gmail."



Learn more here.
So tell me... Do you love it? or ... Hate it?

Move away from AOL to GMail

Free at last - - -
"Extracting your digital life from your old e-mail account has gotten a lot easier. In the spring, Google introduced a feature — made possible by the TrueSwitch e-mail switching service — that lets you import your address book and old messages from several other mail services into a new Gmail account.

First, sign up for a Gmail account (gmail.com) if you haven’t done so. Once you have created an account and have your new mailbox on screen, click the Settings link at the top of the Gmail window."
read the full post at David Pogue's Personal Tech column here.

New Email Tool: PostBox

I am always searching for better email handling. Thunderbird, from Mozilla, the Firefox company has been working well for me since Netscape was shut down by its parent company.

But now I've learned at LifeHacker.com of this new program. All the benefits of Thunderbird, plus similarity to GMail. We can't go wrong using Postbox...

"Postbox - If you're not using your email's web interface, use this. It's basically Thunderbird, the open-source email client we'd previously included in our Lifehacker pack, but remixed with stronger, almost Gmail-like powers. It finds and indexes all the attachments in your email account, groups together conversations with similar subject chains with the "Gather" command (like Gmail's conversations), offers tabbed Inbox and message views, and lets you organize emails under your own chosen "Topics." It's also got built-in easy setup steps for Gmail and other webmail systems—in other words, everything we're waiting to see Thunderbird implement."

Source: Lifehacker.com
Download Postbox: http://postbox-inc.com/

Effective Email

While the world waits for a better email system, here are four succinct points to use in your email messages to ensure you commmunicate effectively.

On Harvard Business Publishing, David Silverman writes an excellent brief on effective emails. His take is that emails should:

Call to Action. Say what you want the reader to do.

Say it Up Front. Don’t bury the message.

Assume Nothing. Include your behind-the-scenes thinking.

Do the Thinking. Avoid the generic “What are your thoughts?” atop a chain of previous emails.

Link to Source: BNET.com

Helen Gallagher

Don't fall for email from IRS.gov

There is a very convincing scam arriving in email boxes throughout the country. It's a phishing scam and requires a victim to click a link and submit information to receive a large IRS stimulus payment. You know better than to fall for that don't you? Even with the convincing email address of irs.gov and the official IRS logo - it's still a phishing scam. The real IRS requests:

"If you receive an unsolicited e-mail communication claiming to be from the IRS, please forward the original message to: phishing@irs.gov using the instructions provided below. You may not receive an individual response to your e-mail because of the volume of reports we receive each day.

• The IRS does not initiate taxpayer communications through e-mail. In addition, the IRS does not request detailed personal information through e-mail or ask taxpayers for the PIN numbers, passwords or similar secret access information for their credit card, bank or other financial accounts.
• Do not open any attachments to questionable e-mails, which may contain malicious code that will infect your computer. Please be advised that the IRS does not initiate contact with taxpayers via e-mails."

Email Overload: top three survival strategies

Coping with email overload is tough, between the worry of missing something important, and the fatigue that comes from scanning the same messages over and over. Try these tips to conquer the bulging Inbox:

1. Think of email like regular paper mail: reply / file / or toss, the same day it arrives.

2. Adopt the Lifehacker.com strategy: Use three folders below the Inbox:

1. Follow-up (or Current)
   
2. Archive
3. Hold

3. File more. Instead of rereading messages and thinking "I should do something about this. I'll get back to it later." try filing the message in an appropriate folder. Either make a folder below your Inbox, or save the message in a project folder. Just click File / Save As and drill over to the project. Then your email correspondence is filed in the same place as documents, budgets, and spreadsheets.

Spam: It's worse than ever

Spam is always bad around the holidays, preying on desperate online shoppers, but this report from InfoPackets newsletter shows the problem is worse than ever, and growing.

Continue to use a good internet protection suite, and don't open anything you're not expecting, or from a trusted source.
The best measures:

1. View your mail without using the Preview feature that opens the message.
2. Delete all the spam based on subject line or sender name.
3. Use File / Print Preview if you're viewing email in an email program like Netscape or SeaMonkey.
4. Press Shift+Delete to bypass the Trash and delete spam without opening.

Email: Out with the old

We lived without email for generations, but now that it has been in common usage over ten years old, we see signs of wear and tear: that's "tear" as in crying, not ripping up.

We try to get rid of messages once read and file those we need to keep, but they keep pouring in and, as we all know, it's hard to find what you're looking for in a mailbox full of bits and bytes.

My manual solution is to:

Prioritize
File
Archive

Yesterday, a friend told me about a unique strategy you can start doing today. Ready for this?

For each email you receive and read, get rid of two.
So, as she said: "If I get 18 messages, I have to get rid of 36."
What a great way to start slowly conquering the overflowing mailboxes. Thanks JB!

Another wonderful thing about technology is that people are always working on new ideas, and there will be smarter email tools in a couple years. What's in the works? It's a concept called Categorization Technology. Think of it as "tags" or the tagging process that shows instantly how many web pages (or in this case, emails) contain certain words.

Tools like SenseClusters, Digitality, and my favorite name: Pigmail, are underway. We'll soon see which rises to the top and helps conquer email overload. One of the companies working on this has obtained the 3000 Enron emails released by the courts and are using them to create the classification models. If you want access to that file, email me!