Regaining control of your inbox…
by David J Bilinsky

I Can’t take it any more
Can you take it any more?
Composed and performed by Vangelis.

This is a greatly abridged version of the full tips article on my blog on controlling your inbox: http://thoughtfullaw.com/?p=29.

Dave Barry says: “The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religious or ethnic background, is that we all believe we are above-average drivers.” Well, I will add to Dave Barry’s list and say that the other thing that unites human beings, regardless of age, is that we all have overflowing e-mail inboxes. More particularly, we don’t know what to do about them. Accordingly, here are tried and true tips for mastering your mailbox:

#1 Use More Than One E-Mail Address
The first technique can be called “divide and conquer.” Here you separate your e-mail addresses and create separate addresses for business, personal, travel and disposable use. This divides the incoming stream right off the get-go.

#2 Don’t Use Your Business Address for Anything Other Than Business
Use an e-mail address separate from your work one for listservs, for receiving information or for public uses. Let these e-mails build up somewhere other than your personal or business e-mail addresses so that when you open your business e-mail, you are not inundated in interesting (but not necessary) e-mails.

#3 Use Your Inbox Only to Gather Mail
Most of us use the inbox as a kind of repository for e-mails that should otherwise be converted into: To-Do’s, memos, meeting notes, reminders, attachments, events, addresses, URLs, etc. There are other ways to store those for recall purposes!

Put those items in folders (To-Do’s, Reminders, etc.) or in your Practice Management Software (e.g. TimeMatters, Amicus Attorney, PC Law, LawStream). The important thing is to get this “stuff” into relevant folders somewhere where it can be found and not let it clutter up your inbox!

#4 Clean Out Your Inbox… Now!
Triage your e-mails, quickly, and separate them:

• The important and urgent ones – leave in your inbox;
• The important but not urgent ones – put into a “To-Do” folder; and
• All the “others” – file away in other folders (reading, listservs, personal, etc.).

Then – go back and attack the urgent and important e-mails. Now!

#5 Prevent the Clutter E-Mail from Coming into the Inbox
Rather than subscribing to listservs, reduce your e-mail load by using RSS – Really Simple Syndication. This eliminates the e-mails and allows you to scan only the most recent listserv postings using a newsreader.

#6 – Use GMail – Or Yahoo Mail for Personal Use
Yahoo and Google Mail (gmail) offer HUGE capacity – Gmail has almost 5000 MB of storage – that increases daily (and Yahoo mail has no storage limits).

Gmail has automatic spam filtering, messaging forwarding, signatures and much much more.

#7 Filters, Flags, & Search Folders
Filters automatically sort e-mails and put them into predefined folders. They take a little time to build, but the payback is huge.

Flags are indicators that you can place next to an e-mail message in Outlook that are colour-coded (red, blue, yellow, green, orange, and purple) and can be a quick visual reminder for different types of e-mails. You can:

• Use flags to follow-up for incoming and outgoing e-mail;
• Flag action options using colours;
• Use as pop-up reminder based on the sender of the e-mail; and
• Sort and arrange your e-mails by colour for at-a-glance priorities.

Search folders are not real folders (such as “Inbox” or “Sent Items”), but rather they are virtual folders that contain views of e-mails matching specific search criteria. “Unread Mail” and “For Follow Up” are two default search folders in Outlook.

Search folders:

• Show unread messages and those marked for follow-up by default;
• Customizable – will show any search you create; and
• Contains shortcuts to messages – the messages themselves remain in the original folder(s).

#8 Spam
E-mail systems can be configured in most cases, to weed out spam automatically.

Since most of us use MS Outlook (at least for our business e-mails) we should use the features in Outlook to minimize spam:

In Outlook click on the “Tools” menu, then “Options,” and then click “Junk E-mail” on the Preferences tab. This in turn, opens the Junk E-mail Options dialog box.

You can choose the level of spam protection that you feel appropriate. You can start on “Low” and if this still produces too much spam, switch to High or even Safe Lists Only.

The next step is to use the “safe senders list” to add in e-mail addresses that are generating “false positives” and being tagged as spam needlessly.

Lastly there is the “Block senders list” which allows you to add in addresses to which you do not wish to receive any further e-mails. For example, you can add in addresses of those individuals who have repeatedly spammed you to save yourself the tedious task of having to delete these unwanted e-mails.

#9 Phishing E-Mails
Phishing e-mails are e-mails that appear to be from legitimate organizations such as a bank but are in fact forged e-mails. They attempt to fool the user in order to fraudulently acquire information such as your bank account number and/or password for illegal uses including identity theft.

In order to enable anti-Phishing for Outlook 2003 (Outlook 2007 has its own anti-phishing and junk e-mail protections):

• Upgrade to Outlook 2003 and install the latest Office 2003 Service Pack (http://office.microsoft.com and click on “Check for free updates”); and
• Install the Junk e-mail filter update for Outlook 2003.

The Junk E-mail Filter – Phishing Protection works as follows:

• Dangerous e-mail is automatically routed to your “Junk E-mail” folder;
• All formatting has been stripped out – all html, all pictures – all you see is straight text;
• All hypertext links are turned off; and
• If good e-mails are ending up in your “Junk E-mail” folder, then: Right-click on one of those e-mails. Then click “Junk E-Mail” and then “Add Sender to Safe Senders List.”

Conclusion
We have just run through some of the tried and tested techniques to wrestle the e-mail demon to the ground and start to regain control over your inbox (and your life!).

Now – what remains is for you to take that first step and start along the journey that leads to an inbox that only has a few items (that came in today!) and which you can easily deal with by the end of day. As they say, every journey begins with a single step. All it takes is for you to say that you can’t take it any more….

David J. Bilinsky is the Practice Management Advisor at the Law Society of British Columbia. E-mail: daveb@lsbc.org. Blog: www.thoughtfullaw.com. The views expressed herein are strictly those of the author and may not be shared by the author’s employer, the Law Society of British Columbia.

This article originally appeared in the December 2007 issue of BarTalk and is reproduced here with permission of both the author and the Canadian Bar Association, British Columbia Branch.