Getting the upper hand on your e-mail

There was an interesting discussion on one of my favorite mail lists about how people organize their e-mail. What kicked it off was an article on "CNN Money" titled Secrets of greatness: How I work.

The somewhat over-exposed Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, says she gets 700 to 800 messages per day (presumably after de-spamming), and she says she uses the weekends to catch up: "I'll just sit down and do e-mail for 10 to 14 hours straight." Lucky gal.

Also mentioned in the article is Amy Schulman, a partner at DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary, who claims a measly 600 messages per day. Her strategy is to divide them into four categories and then deal with them immediately: "First are e-mails that I forward to someone else. Next are messages where somebody's giving me information that I need to cascade to somebody else with instructions. Third are the ones that I can read later on an airplane. Fourth are those that require me to respond immediately."

I checked out my own e-mail load. I used to run my own mail server, and in those days it was handling about 2,500 messages per day, but most were spam. I assume the spam is still at a similar level but now I use Everyone.net to host my e-mail services so I only see around 200 to 300 messages per day (a total lightweight, I know, but then, I'm not a highly paid corporate type with ulcers).

Of my 200-plus messages per day about 25% are spam that squeaked past the filters, so I have around 200 real messages to deal with.

I use Outlook, and as I have a lot of e-mail aliases I have a ton of rules that do things such as route messages sent to backspin@gibbs.com, gearhead@gibbs.com and webapps@gibbs.com into my Feedback folder.

Everything personal stays in my in-box, while news@gibbs.com goes into my News folder and pr@gibbs.com goes into my Press folder. I also have a Hell folder where I route messages from the likes of Russian pizza parlors and The University of Phoenix.

Messages from lists get filed into separate folders and finally, personal messages from my consulting clients get routed to individual folders and notification pop-ups are created.