Get your emails organized

by Detlev Reimer

Chances are great, you receive more than 5-10 emails per
day and you certainly have experienced more than once that
these emails can pile up very fast if you have not been at
home for some days.

Usually, most of us just use our inbox to receive emails,
just like I did until some weeks ago, whether it is in
Outlook, Eudora, Pegasus or whatever email program you
might use.

As an online marketer you should be cleverer than that...

If you don't want to waste your time, sorting out these
mails manually, you have to prepare your incoming mailbox
and do something different to get a quick overview which
emails are spam and can be deleted, which emails are worth
looking at and which emails are urgent and have to be
answered immediately.

You can do this by creating subdirectories in your inbox.
Just split it up into categories like :

Spam
Friends
Marketing contacts
Prospects
Customers
Newsletters
Affiliates etc.

But, of course, you have to assign certain rules to your
incoming emails, they won't split up into the right boxes
by themselves.

There is a simple solution to this: Email programs have
filters which do the work for you . I will use Outlook
Express as an example as it is one of the most spread email
programs; you have to check the explained options in your
own email program and do it in a similar way (maybe in your
program it is called "filters").

If you take the menu item "Extras" in Outlook Express, you
will find a submenu that is called "Rules". Here, you can
choose between rules for emails, for newsgroups and for your
list of blocked email addresses.

After choosing email rules, a new window opens and you see
some checkboxes which actually are the rules you want to
apply to your emails.

In most cases, you will sort your emails by sender.

You can do this by checking the first menu item

1.) x Contains sender in the "From" - line

and then you check :

2.) x Move into "...." directory
3.) x Now you can click on the blue marked "sender"

and you choose for example a friend of yours from your
address book or you make it more general and you move all
senders from @yahoo.com to your "Marketing contacts"
folders by clicking on "directory" and choosing the
appropriate item.

Now you have successfully created a new rule and you can
assign a name for it as well e.g. "Close friends" or
something like that..

If you don't even want to read spam messages you can apply a
filter that deletes it immediately.

Or you can prepare an answer that is being sent if certain
words appear in the body copy or in the subject line.

This means, you are able to create a kind of autoresponder
that is triggered by keywords instead of a sender and this
can be very powerful as well.

Or perhaps, you do not want to receive messages that exceed
a certain file size e.g. if a message is >1 MB. Then you can
apply a filter that forbids your email program to download
these messages.

There is an endless variety of filters you can use.

Do yourself a favour and use them; they will save you a lot
of time.

About the Author

Article by Detlev Reimer. Feel free to use the article with these
bylines included. Detlev has just finished creating his first product,
a database program for Internet marketers which will help you to save
and organize e.g. your advertising, customer and contact data. For
further details, please visit : http://www.promobuddy.com/ . Sign up
for his newsletter at http://www.internetmarketing-success.com/ .