Posts Tagged ‘email’
Email Is Harder on Recipients Than Senders…
June 9th, 2011
... and it's too easy and cheap to add recipients. TED's Chris Anderson discusses why email sucks, why it's getting worse, and how the battle of the overloaded inbox is a losing one. I couldn't agree with his diagnosis more, but his solution—to create an email charter we link to in our signatures—doesn't sound like the solution that will change the world. Still, I've spent a whole lot of time articulating email best practices myself, so I support having the conversation. Here's how you can help create an email charter. Update: Here's the completed email charter.
February 2nd, 2010, 12 comments
I'm thrilled to announce a new series of weekly videos and blog posts that I'll be publishing at FastCompany.com called "Work Smart," which will cover personal productivity in a digital world. Long-time Lifehacker readers will recognize much of the material, but some fantastic editing and animation make each 2-4 minute video segment a whole new, fun format. The debut Work Smart video segment takes on the age old digital productivity problem: email overload.
In this 2 minute, 45 second segment, I describe my three-folder system for emptying your email inbox on a day-to-day basis, and keeping on top of everything you have to do, are waiting for, or want to keep on hand for reference.
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Year-End To-do: Audit Your Email Account Security
December 19th, 2009
Two stories of online account break-ins this week: First, Twitter.com got redirected to an Iranian hacker page because attackers were able to get into the email account registered with their site DNS service. Second, savvy blogger Amit Agarwal's Gmail and Google Apps accounts were taken over because the attacker got access to Amit's secondary email address and sent a password change request there to get into the accounts. Do yourself a favor: Before 2010 is upon us, do a quick audit of all your most important accounts. Make sure your passwords are strong and remember: Never use inactive webmail as your secondary email account.
December 11th, 2009, 2 comments
Just like the rest of us, Outlook user Scott Hanselman gets too much email, and he's come up with some rules that auto-prioritize incoming email into folders before he even looks at it. Scott uses Outlook at work, and messages from his co-workers inside his company are higher priority; also, he gets invited to a lot of meetings via Outlook. If this is similar to your situation, check out Scott's strategy. He set up three rules which separate incoming email into 1.) messages that were sent directly to him (he's in the To: field), 2.) messages he was CC:'ed on, 3.) messages from outside his company, and 4.) meeting invitations. Hit up Scott's full post for step-by-step directions on how to set up these rules.
As always, your preferred email processing system depends on your situation. As a freelancer who doesn't use Outlook, rarely gets meeting invitations, and almost always gets messages from outside my non-company, this strategy doesn't work as well for me, but for a nine-to-fiver inside a corporate firewall, it makes a whole lot of sense. Thanks, Scott!
The Three Most Important Outlook Rules for Processing Mail [Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen]
October 3rd, 2009, 16 comments
If you already own a domain name like yourname.com, you want to use your personalized email address--but you don't want to advertise to the world you're forwarding to and sending those messages from Gmail. While you can manage multiple email accounts inside Gmail by using forwarding, the POP fetcher, and different reply-to addresses, there's an easier way--especially for groups like your family or small business. Google Apps Standard Edition (formerly known as "Google Apps for Your Domain") can host your personal email at Gmail, but without tying you to a gmail.com address for free. Obviously you'll need a domain to use this service, which will cost something to register. When you sign up for a Google Apps account, you'll have to set your domain name's email MX record to point to Google's servers (you'll get instructions on how to do that when you sign up). Once that's done, you've got Gmail behind your personalized domain name. The Google Apps Standard Edition includes Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Sites (for simple web pages).
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August 29th, 2009
On each new episode of This Week in Google (details) I’ll highlight a tip for using cloud/Google apps smarter, faster, and better. I’ll document those tips here.
This week Gmail engineers added a richer contact interface for filling in the To:, Cc:, and Bcc: fields when you're composing a new email message. While address auto-completion has been available for some time now, the new Contact Chooser lets you check multiple recipients off a list. Click on the To:, Cc:, or Bcc: field names (which are now links) to try it out.
Click to enlarge the screenshot on the right to see this in action. You can search for contacts by keyword, or just show names in contact groups by choosing it from the drop-down. Then, check off all your recipients from the list and click the Done button to add those recipients to your message.
I still rely heavily on auto-complete as-you-type since I usually send email to one or two frequent contacts, but the chooser pop-up comes in handy when you've got a long list of folks to email and you need some help finding them in your contacts.
Gmail Adds Custom SMTP Servers, Drops “On Behalf Of”
July 30th, 2009, 6 comments
Used to be that when you sent Gmail messages with a custom from address, there would be an "On behalf of you@gmail.com" bit added to the headers of the message because you were using Gmail's outgoing SMTP server. It didn't show up in all email clients, but those using Microsoft Outlook did see it, and it made your email look a little more janky than it had to. Happily, today Gmail is scrapping the "on behalf of" business and letting you associate custom SMTP servers with your custom from: addresses. Hit up the Accounts tab under Settings in your Gmail account to get it configured.
July 29th, 2009, 6 comments
Registering for an account at any web site almost always requires an email address, and some people like to use a secondary address they don't really care about instead of their real email address to avoid spam. If you do this, don't use a Hotmail (Update: or other free webmail) account.
Microsoft shuts down Hotmail accounts that haven't been logged into after nine months. So if you registered for your Gmail account two years ago and used your Hotmail address as your secondary email address and never logged back in, you've put your Gmail account at risk.
Here's how: If your Hotmail account gets shut down due to inactivity, someone else can open a new one using your Hotmail address. Then, if that someone else requests a password reset from Gmail, it goes to that address, and that someone can get into your primary email account. This is how Twitter employees' Gmail accounts got broken into last week.
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How to Stay on Top of Ye Olde Email Inbox
June 9th, 2009, 3 comments
Inbox Zero is a topic path well-trodden in the productivity blogosphere, but two books and a few blogs about personal productivity later, staying on top of my email is still a daily challenge for me. While I don't get down to zero every day, I do get there once or twice a week--usually when my inbox overflows onto the next page. (In Gmail, that's when I get past 50 conversations.) Over at my Harvard Business blog, I ran down my tried and true techniques for keeping the electronic mail under control. If you're suffering from a severe case of overload or could just use a refresher, check out Extreme Makeover: The Email Inbox Edition.
May 20th, 2009, 3 comments
A neat new Gmail Labs feature can translate email in another language to your native tongue. That's cool, but when it comes to foreign languages, what Gmail really needs is the ability to search and filter by the language a message is written in.
Let's face it, if you only speak one language, most of the mail in your non-native tongue is likely spam. Imagine being able to create a filter that deletes, archives, or labels all messages that are -lang:English (not in English), or automatically marks any message that's lang:Russian as spam. Of course, this gets complicated if a message contains a few languages, but it would be a start to avoiding having to manually process messages that are obviously not meant for you.
March 19th, 2009, 3 comments
One of the lesser-known aspects of Gmail Labs' useful Canned Responses feature is that it's available as a filter action. This means you can auto-reply to messages that match criteria you set up with a canned response. For example, you can say that any message from Aunt Bertha with "Fwd" in the subject line should automatically get the response: "I love you Aunt Bertha, but please stop forwarding me chain letters."
As for me, I'm using this to deal with certain particularly persistent public relations people who send press releases to my personal email address. I used to just automatically filter those messages to a label I never look at; now, I can automatically reply with the following using canned responses:
Hi--Looks like you've sent me a press release. Please remove my email address from your mailing list.
Then shuttle the message off to a label I never look at. Check out the setup in the screenshot above. In the second screen of the filter creation process, check off "Send canned response" and choose the one you've set up from the list.
For more on enabling Gmail Labs and its best features, see my picks for best Labs features (including Canned Responses).
March 11th, 2009, 3 comments
Good strong filters can go a long way in processing your email based on rules you set up automatically. (Think: "Delete any Fwd from Aunt Bertha that mentions Rush Limbaugh automatically.") Gmail Labs just added a new filter import/export feature, which lets you back up, save, import, export, and swap useful email filters, so I did just that over at Lifehacker this morning.
Hit up my feature story that offers 10 useful filters in a downloadable, importable XML file for your Gmail filtering pleasure.
March 10th, 2009, 10 comments
In the depths of email overload desperation last week, I wished email messages had an 140-character limit like Twitter updates do. In response, two people recommended doing what Kevin Rose does: Set your desktop email signature to "Sent from my mobile phone."
It's a white lie that makes you look less rude for being short. It's annoying to have to fib (and embarrassing if you get caught somehow--of course all of Kevin's friends now know his "secret"). But for someone who gets more than 100 messages per day, this technique may be a matter of survival versus just saving time. Haven't set this up myself yet, but if I wind up at the bottom of another email mountain getting ready for a processing marathon, I just might.
March 9th, 2009, 8 comments
A few years ago I would've sworn I'd never give up a rich desktop email program like Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird to check my email in a web browser. But here I am in 2009, a full-time web-based Gmail user. Back when I was a zealous Thunderbird evangelist, I said it was T-bird's extensibility and the endless things it could do with add-ons that made it better than any fixed-feature webapp. But Google launched its own set of "add-ons" in the form of Gmail Labs features, and some of them have become such an important part of my email workflow I'll never look back. Where Labs falls short, Greasemonkey user scripts via the Better Gmail 2 Firefox extension fill in the gaps.
The list of available Gmail Labs features seems to lengthen by the week, but there are quite a few "meh" items that drown out the really good ones. Here are the five I've got enabled, plus the Better Gmail 2 options I've got checked off.
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February 26th, 2009, 19 comments
This succinct set of workday guidelines is a nice blueprint for getting productive on the important stuff and ruthless about cutting the crap. Written on a unknown "major corp" whiteboard pictured here, they read:
QUALITY vs quantity, UX process.
Check email ONLY:
Send any time
Set email to check every 3 hours.
NO email on evenings.
NO email on weekends.
EMERGENCY? = Use phone.
FOCUS 1-3 Activities max/day
LOG 1-3 Succinct status bullets every day on team wiki
MINIMIZE chat
MAXIMIZE single-tasking
OUT by 5:30PM
~No excuses~
These common productivity edicts are worth repeating; recently I advised Harvard Business readers to use a daily three-item task list myself. I've been practicing this technique every weekday without fail for the last six weeks, and it's served me well (though I've gotten cocky and the list has started inching up to five or six items). On top of sleeping, showering, eating, working out, commuting, cooking, and communicating, the reality is that three things DONE is a bigger set of accomplishments than it seems. As for the rest of these--well, I'm working on them. Hat tip to Caterina.
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