This is the third blog post in this series of email management tips. If you missed the past posts, the first one was about What Successful People Do with the First Hour of their Work-Day, and the second blog post about Shocking Statistics On Email As A Productivity-Stealer. In this post we will present to you 5 best practices and tools that will protect your Inbox from spam and will give you better control on receiving newsletters and frequent emails.

1. Protect your email: Your email is your identity, your name, your ID number in the virtual life. Therefore don’t treat it like an experimental rabbit, don’t use it in everything or on every form you fill, instead use a second email address or disposable email address for unimportant things, such as newsletters, discussion forums and software registration, etc. Reason is that many websites don’t keep their email privacy promises and they will sell/share your data with 3rd parties and you end up receiving emails from unknown sources.
2. Don’t delete, UNSUBSCRIBE (Ruthlessly): This is a very important tip, for some people it might reduce 90% of emails they receive. The logic behind this tip is that if you don’t read a newsletter this means you don’t need it anymore, some people will try to be smart and will save all newsletters in a sub-Inbox to read them later on, with time they add up to hundreds and you know the end, delete!
   Be a proactive and just unsubscribe from these newsletters you don’t read anymore.
3. Use technology to fight spam: Even with the precautions you take you still receive spam and automated email, so what is the solution? One of the ways to receiv emails from only real people and newsletters you approve of is by using an authentication service such as boxbe. When you subscribe to such a service only verified senders email’s will go to your Inbox (such as emails saved in your contacts), for the unverified sender, the sender is notified that their message hasn’t been delivered and they are given instructions as to how to complete delivery.
4. Make your own Newsletters Times: As we said in Shocking Statistics On Email As A Productivity-Stealer blog each time you got distracted by an email you will need some time to focus again on the task you were working on, the problem with the newsletters is they arrive at any time of the day, and sometimes you might skip reading a good newsletter (such as a bpir newsletter 🙂 ) because it has arrived in your very busy time. There is a brilliant solution, by using unroll.me which will scan your email for newsletters, Twitter and Facebook notifications, or anything else you get on a regular basis then it compile it into a single daily digest every morning , afternoon, or evening (your choice). It’s like creating your own daily newspaper, Unroll.me is currently available for gmail, gmail app and yahoo.
5. Colour your Inbox: The old-school way of organising your emails is simply by moving emails to meaningful folders containing similar items or require similar action, now you can do much more than that. New versions of outlook and web emails such as gmail can automate this process, you can tag each email by a coloured label based on a keyword, subject, sender, etc. you can even tag a single email with multiple labels, for example “waiting payment” and “local customer”.

Ahmed
BPIR.com