Managing Email - Part 2: Being Organised
In part one I discussed the nightmare of ever increasing emails, some tips to reduce your mailbox size and a method of archiving old email.
In this article I will look at a more advanced way of managing your email – we will look in depth of one particular method of doing this – that is, my way!
I definitely do not want to say ‘Do it my way’, nor necessarily recommend you do it exactly this way; but I hope it will give you an insight in to the many different ways of managing email and help you formulate your own methods.
“My Email”
I receive a lot of emails. Many of them are very important (contractual emails), others are worthless (spam), some require a rapid response (emails from clients) and some I need to keep and refer to later (sign-up emails containing login details etc).
Using spider office I access my email via Outlook on my laptop, on my smartphone when on the move and via Outlook Web Access from various machines when I don’t have my laptop
So, what are my email requirements?
1. Access to all email from any location, both old and new
2. Offline access to recent email on my laptop
3. Be able to quickly easily find the email I need
4. Have all my email backed-up
5. Know which emails I need to deal with
6. Access new emails on my phone
How do I meet these requirements?
Personally I do not like ‘Personal Folders’ – ie. Outlook email folders that are stored in a file on your local computer. They are troublesome to backup, and they are only available on that one machine; therefore they do not meet requirement number 1.
I am not afraid of having a large mailbox, mine is currently nearly 3 gigabytes. The cost of additional storage is insignificant compared to the convenience and security of having everything stored centrally and backed-up. I therefore do not archive or remove any email from my mailbox. This means that all email is available via Outlook Web Access from any location – this meets requirement 1 and 4. Since everything is in one place I can very quickly use the search features in Outlook and Outlook Web Access to find the email I need, no matter how old it is – this meets requirement 3.
So how do I organise all this email?
Since email is not archived or removed from my mailbox, I do have to move items in to folders to keep my main Inbox clear. When I have dealt with an email I move it out of my Inbox and in to a sub folder – this way my inbox only contains new items, or items I need to respond to. I also ‘Flag’ very important messages. This solves requirement 5 – I have a small inbox and with a quick glance I can see items that require my attention and nothing gets missed or lost. I try to keep the number of emails in my inbox to less than 100.
But you still have a large mailbox, doesn’t that slow down your computer?
This is a very good point. In part 1 I said that the bigger your mailbox the slower your computer goes. This is true, however it only becomes a big problem when the local data stored by Outlook exceeds about 2GB. The server doesn’t care about the size of your mailbox, it can handle almost limitless amounts of storage (realistically only limited by the additional storage costs you are willing to pay for).
By default Outlook synchronises your entire mailbox to your computer. For me, this is a problem as it would slow down a lot. There is a clever technique to work around this though. You can actually instruct Outlook to not synchronise certain folders from the server to your local machine.
I have therefore setup the following folders:
- Clients (emails from clients)
- Personal (personal emails, not shared with collegues)
- SpiderGroup (internal company related emails)
- Suppliers (emails from suppliers)
- Alerts (automated emails from our alerting systems)
- Old Inbox (Any email older than 1 year) 1700MB
- Sent Items 320MB
- Old Sent Items (Any sent email older than 1 year) 600MB
I have set Outlook to not synchronise the ‘Old Inbox’ and ‘Old Sent Items’ to my machine. Therefore, although I have a 3Gb mailbox, the amount of data Outlook has synchronised is only 620MB. This gives me the last 1 year of email offline, while my Outlook runs nice and smoothly.
If I need to access any email that is in the old folders, I can simply log in to Outlook Web Access and read the email directly off the server.
How do I do this?
To prevent Outlook from synchronising a folder to your local machine do the following:
-
Right click on the folder and select ‘Properties’
- Go to the ‘Synchronization’ tab and click ‘Filter...’
- Here you can set rules that tell Outlook which messages you want to synchronise. Annoyingly there isn’t an option for ‘Don’t synchronise any’, so I select ‘Only items that are unread’ in the ‘More Choices’ tab. Since all my old email is ‘read’, Outlook wont synchronise any of it to my local machine
Things to remember
With this technique I do have to remember to keep my Inbox under control. I delete any junk or unneeded email immediately and I move processed/read email out of the inbox in to the appropriate subfolder. A benefit of this is that only a small amount of email is synchronised to my phone and any email that is there is important and needs dealing with.
I also periodically use the advanced search to find all email older than 1 year and move it in to the Old Inbox and Old Sent Items folders.
If you have a headache with email management, why not let us know why and maybe we can help.
If you have developed your own technique, tell us about it and we can pass it on in a future article.
Ben Nichols, Chief Infrastructure Architect