Email Makeover – Get your computer organized one email at a time!

Oh email. How I love checking you out, seeing new messages, news, and information from you. But! How I hate to erase, scroll down, reply and file those same messages. Frankly, it’s beginning to seem like a part-time job. Email, we have to end this love / hate relationship!

Sound familiar? In this world of increasingly used social media platforms, applications and email marketing, replying to emails on top of the rest your other online duties can feel like a daily battle. And I’ll bet your blocked up inbox isn’t helping either. Be your own personal organizer and find out whether your email needs a makeover by answering the following questions:

1. Do you find that you are missing out on potential business opportunities because of a messy inbox?
2. Do you have multiple pages of email in your inbox?
3. Have you considered opening a new account to escape from junk mail?
4. Do you have a scroll bar on your folders menu?
5. Do you consistently receive junk mail in your inbox folder?

If you’ve answered yes to ANY of these questions, than your inbox could use some lovin’. So take some time and consider using the following emergency inbox maintenance tips – you’ll save yourself time and money in the process.

• Magic words: the unsubscribe button.
  Once you learn this trick, you will take great pleasure in performing it. Some of the junk email we receive is purely that: junk. But almost half of it comes from pages or sites you’ve subscribed to, often unknowingly. So, when you receive mail that looks familiar, but is unwanted, click on the email. Without going to their site, scroll down to the bottom of them email. There you will se e a link that says: “Do you want to unsubscribe” to this email? Click on the word “unsubscribe” and – presto – no more emails from that sender. You’re welcome.
• Limit folders.
  When you create ultra-specific folder titles, you create an unnecessarily complicated system: in order to find the email you are looking for, you’ll have to remember the specific name of the folder containing that email. The cure? Instead of creating a folder called “September conference”, call it “conferences 2013”. It’s cleaner and easier to have fewer folders with more emails contained within them, as opposed to the opposite.
• Control your security settings.
  By going into your account settings and clicking on ‘security’, you can adjust the privacy settings on your inbox. Convert your email settings to “exclusive”, which should filter out much of your junk mail for you automatically (only emails from people in your address book will make it to your inbox). Just be sure to add new contacts into your address book so that they don’t slip through the cracks – you will get an automatic option to do this when you receive a mail from that person. I like to check my junk mail every day. It takes just 30 seconds to do and it’s much easier to click “erase all” when I’m done, as opposed to going through them one by one.

We’d love to wave our magic organizing wand and magic away all of your email woes, but the truth is that email is, well, personal and will always require some work and constancy on your part.

After years of helping people organize computer files and emails, we can say for certain that you will maintain a clean and happy inbox much easier once you do some initial clean up.