Slashdot Asks: How Do You Manage Your Inbox? (npr.org) 182
Being one of the oldest forms of electronic messaging, users have come up with all sorts of different approaches to managing emails. Some people follow the "Inbox Zero" method of filing and deleting emails religiously, while others embrace the "Inbox Infinity" method of letting email messages pile up, replying to what they can and ignoring the rest. Taylor Lorenz, a staff writer at The Atlantic, suggests users embrace the latter for 2019. Lulu Garcia-Nevarro writes via NPR: In a recent piece in The Atlantic, tech writer Taylor Lorenz argues, in 2019, you should lose the zero and embrace the Zen. Let all those emails flooding your inbox wash over you. Respond to what you can, and ignore the rest. Key to inbox infinity -- telling close contacts and family that your email replies might be slow in coming -- if at all -- as well as alternative ways to reach you. It's that easy. Or maybe not, depending on how email-dependent your boss, your colleagues and your best friend, your mom and your husband are. As for me, I've apparently been embracing inbox infinity for years without knowing it. And let me tell you, it feels great. Don't expect a reply anytime soon. How do you manage your inbox? Would you say you follow one of these two principles, or do you have an in-between method that works for you?
I don't. (Score:4, Funny)
I've jumped on the buzzword bandwagon and let AI manage it for me.
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I ignore it till someone asks me if I got that mail they sent me.
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I can be your long lost pal
I can call you Betty
And Betty when you call me
You can call me AI
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I use my phone's powerful AI technology to sort my emails but resting it on the delete key.
I prefer to say "Badly", but with AI support (Score:2)
The sorting does help, though the spam filtering is increasingly laughable.
What I really want is a variation of future delivery. I want to be able to set up replies for the future with reminders as the deadline approaches. The AI aspect would be learning to recognize my priorities to help with recommended deadlines and more timely reminders: "You drafted this reply to Nancy two days ago. Want to check it again or just let it go out tomorrow." In other words I generally want to slow down and control the temp
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My AI is miles ahead. It responds to Nancy, so that I don't have to.
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I've jumped on the buzzword bandwagon and let AI manage it for me.
You jest, but as someone who was forced to use Outlook 365 the first thing I did was switch off that worthless "focused inbox" which appeared to take a guess at what I wanted to see at any given time.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Work = Infinity, Personal = Zero (Score:1)
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As a matter of fact that phrase was near perfection, if a bit long.
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Nothing wrong with the sentence grammatically or semantically (stylistically is a different matter).
Try reading when undrunk. Or after finishing school ;-)
Re: Work = Infinity, Personal = Zero (Score:1)
Not sure if I'm alone here, but I was taught to only use numeric characters when listing a quantity or measurement, e.g 5 eggs, 20,000ft etc.
In this case, writing "1 inbox" is poor practice (in my humble opinion) and ought to be replaced with "a single inbox", which properly communicates the intended meaning.
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I never thought I'd say it, but the world now needs more English majors (legitimate, competent ones).
(And all that, coming from an engineering major).
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Couple ways (Score:2)
Personal/Financial/warrantee indo : archive and store in mbox format offline.
Work: store until project completion, archive any promises of favors/extra cash incentives, keep anything else documented with project documentation.
Everything else, terminate with extreme prejudice.
I took an actual course on this (Score:2)
I took an actual course on this when working for a rich company in the internet boom era. There was an emphasis on customizing the MS Outlook home page six ways from Sunday.
It worked pretty well, but, just like with the $100 Franklin-Covey MS Outlook add-on I bought in the late 1990s, I stopped using it after only a few months.
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Nice low-effort comment, stupid.
Manage? (Score:2)
Have 32 inboxes (Score:4, Interesting)
Automatically move emails to the appropriate inbox from the main inbox.
Computors is good at sorting - let them do it for you.
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Are they?
Looking at my GMail account. Most of my Inbox e-mails (21496 entries and counting) are marked as "Important according to Google Magic", including but not limited to crappy newsletters which I keep around because I am too lazy to visit some websites every other week or so. At the same time, perfectly legitimate e-mails with tasks from my other job ended up in SPAM despite having come from the same e-mail address and with similar content:
Dear $NAME,
The following task was sent to you:
Subject: $SUBJ
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That's probably because you have 21496 emails in your inbox.
Gmail figures out what emails are important by seeing how long it takes you to read them, reply to them and archive them. If you leave them in your inbox it assumes you are not done with them (otherwise you would have archived), so they must be important and you intend to come back to them later.
"Archive" is a bit misleading here, all it does is move the email to your "All Mail" folder and they will still appear in search results by default.
My advi
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The address is in my contact list, has been there since day 1. I clicked No Spam, obviously, when that happened. I guess it sees it as SPAM because sometimes I am getting up to 15 such e-mails per day.
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The other thing you can try is creating a filter based on the email address or a subject match. In the list of actions you can select "not spam".
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Good idea, I'll do that.
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I have 14 unread messages. Usually there's 3 to 5, but today I was busy with other things and didn't parse my new messages.
My work account has lots of subfolders, but my personal GMail account has labels attached to e-mails. The place where they reside should not be relevant.
Re:Have 32 inboxes (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to do that but realized it wasn't actually saving me time and I was in fact wasting effort sorting stuff I mainly never looked at again.
Now I just rely on search, specifically Gmail's. By remembering some simple syntax (e.g. to:) and with auto-complete I can find anything in a few seconds and don't have to spend any time sorting or organizing. It's a lot more efficient.
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Actually, that works terribly.
Mark which ones need follow-up, mark them completed when done, and move them all into job folders for records in case a problem comes up. (Frankly, I need to be a little more timely about moving them into job folders) "AI" is not good at knowing where to put them.
To do list (Score:1)
Inbox is my to do list. If it is there I need to do something if I delete it I do not.
That worked well for me, needs auto filters (Score:2)
I really need to set up some automatic filters again so that I don't have an ever-growing Inbox, so that any email in my inbox is something I want / need to act on. That worked pretty well for for a number of years.
My current company doesn't use email much for important things, instead using it for a lot of automatic notifications and mailing lists I don't care about. I should filter that stuff.
It's nice to not have to work that hard (Score:2)
Yeah I do get to spend a lot of time here.
It's nice not having to "work" long hours.
Instead, the hours I put in are studying. Just before seeing your post, I was taking a practice test for my CISSP. That'll both bump my pay up another $15K/year and make it even easier for me to get jobs in laid-back companies where people aren't over-worked.
Use two emails: private & public (Score:5, Interesting)
I have 2 domain names:
* Private one that my family uses and know that they can get a near instantaneous response, and
* Public one that I use for ALL business related emails. I also have an email alias for _each_ company so I can which fucker sells me out if they do.
If my name was John Smith:
john.amazon@smith.com
john.bank@smith.com
john.crapco@smith.com
john.groupon@smith.com
john.monoprice@smith.com
john.shadyco@smith.com
john.woot@smith.com
and I start getting emails from john.shadyco discussing crap co products/services then I know which of these assholes sold me out.
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A good system. I thought of doing the same thing, but then I decided I really don't care who sells me out, or whose data was breached, leaked or copied etc, so I save myself the hassle of opening a new account every time I need to submit an email. I just have a few accounts, the two main ones are:-
* the decoy account used for anything I don't care about or likely to pull spam
* the other is your private email account.
But good on you for having such diligence, I hope you notify these companies when they "se
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it's not so much to know who 'sells you out', it's to know the source of a breached account so you can either change your credentials with them or delete/terminate service and tell 'em to fuck off... BUT you should use something a little harder to decipher than what your parent reply suggests.. otherwise spammers and scammers will just add john.[everymainwebsite]@smith.com to their lists (yes, their software and algos are that 'sophisticated'.. much more so, in fact).
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I used to do this years ago, but the amount of spam become overwhelming. I eventually ended it when I started receiving shady emails for a company with a domain name similar to mine, when the sender made a typo in the destination address.
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Better than new accounts is to use extended addressing - the default character is a + so foo+bar@domain gets delivered to foo@domain. Some webmail clients or email validation scripts have issues with the + although it is valid per RFCs, so I changed it on my postfix config to a hyphen (-) - foo-bar@domain gets to foo@domain
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so I save myself the hassle of opening a new account every time I need to submit an email.
In this example the domain is owned, so you'd get all email delivered sent to *@smith.com. No hassle necessary.
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You could have just put "+whatever" after your username. Most email systems ignore anything after the "+" character in email addresses.
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This is a good idea but, frustratingly, a lot of registration forms reject the "+" as an invalid character in an email address despite its being part of the spec. However, if one controlled one's own mail server it would be trivial to combine the grandparent poster's scheme and your own by adding '.' as an extension-delimiting character, with the added benefit that it would be more difficult for spammers to detect.
I've been doing just that with postfix for a number of years with great success.
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I’ve done the same for decades (since back well before gmail and it’s fantastic spam filtering capabilities). I default *@ my domain to me, and add blocks when I get spammed.
Surprisingly, it’s quite rare that I get third party email. Usually what I get is directly from the company I gave the address to, and while they signed me up for their newsletter without permission, they still honor the unsubscribe request. Still jackasses, but not so bad that I need to stop using them altogether.
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I do similarly but with only one domain, using randomly generated aliases to hand out to businesses which get hacked, sell me out, or just plain spam me. E.g.
realaccount@example.com
43f38fa3@example.com
de36ef49@example.com
54e106ec@example.com
cdea6bc8@example.com
0f039cf2@example.com
eb709e90@example.com
e91f34c2@example.com
This has been helpful not only for me, but also to prove to local businesses that their service provider has been hacked.
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Sometimes it's an internal compromise and a disgruntled employee takes the user database.
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I do a similar thing. Except it's a catch-all on a subdomain that is not easily guessed. Being a subdomain means that it has never been targeted by a dictionary spam flood.
Services that are trustworthy just use my main email address.
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I do this, via qmail's -default. When a company sells me out or looses their database (linkedin, multiple times) I can easily change at source and echo # > .qmail-linkedin.
For reading mail, that's done via mutt, since that does a great job of hiding junk content, if there's no text/plain or the HTML is the body, chances are a spam source sent it. Won't be read. If it looks legit via the subject then I'll go to the effort of viewing with lynx.
For the first part, most vendors (gmail, etc) will allow SMTP a
Re:Use two emails: private & public (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Use two emails: private & public (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: Use two emails: private & public (Score:2)
I used to do this when I had my own domain. Amazing how quickly after buying tickets that spammers were using my TicketMaster email address. With the advent of GDPR, Iâ(TM)m thinking of starting this again with the goal of getting some of these companies punished.
Itâ(TM)s a bit of a pain managing unique email addresses per company, but it does reduce the effort of changing an email address.
Walled Garden (Score:1)
Infinity all the way (Score:2)
why not both? (Score:3)
Keep it all. Anything older than a month or so gets moved to archive storage. Default view is sorted by date and then unread. I read it, deal with it, and ignore or read it, flag it as unread and deal with it later. Rarely anything more than 24 hours old. Some notifications, etc. I get I typically just select and file, unless it is one I am looking out for in particular (student questions from course management system, open issue on my work code, etc)
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Finally! (Score:3)
Inbox Infinity - a philosophy I can get behind! ...with emphasis on the “get behind” part.
Finally I don’t have to feel bad about the 2000 messages I’ve let get stacked up in my inbox!
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Every so often I move messages out of my inbox and into other folders - in theory to deal with them later. And, every year or so, I go to the oldest messages and start working my way forward, dumping any that don't seem relevant anymore. I'm caught up through the year 2008 now!!
In total I currently have 13000 email messages across all my work mail folders. My personal email totals 3600 messages. BUT in both cases - all the messages have been read, at least!
Religious monthly cleanout and archiving ... (Score:3)
My primary email address and mailbox is maintained daily, deleting all spam and junk. At the end of every month, all large attachments are saved (if valuable) and otherwise deleted. Then the mailbox for that month is archived and a new mailbox for the new month starts with zero. Archived mailboxes are accessible via the IMAP server.
Each month amounts to about 30MB of archived emails. I have emails dating back to the early 1980's. All searchable with grep or imap.
All incoming emails to this primary email address are also copied to another mailbox. This other mailbox is the one that my cell phone accesses. This mailbox is aged out at about 10 days (i.e. nothing is older than 10 days). So the cell phone doesn't have to keep infinity emails and its set to delete emails after about 7-10 days also.
I have multiple other email addresses, on gmail, hotmail/outlook, and yahoo. I used to try to maintain these also, but now I just let them do the infinite thing... Only one of these addresses keeps really important stuff. Most are use for non-critical Internet nonsense and handles for various Internet accounts.
pfff, "ignore the rest"..NO, be proactive (Score:2)
Delete that shit you would ignore, immediately. It will never bother you again. Worried it might be important later or something? Bah, it will get less important with each passing day.
near infinity (Score:2)
The Antisocial Method (Score:2)
Two email addresses -- the real one and a stunt double that attracts all the mail order brides and scammers/spammers.
A cell phone is my other voice messaging system. Also good for texts.
At the doctor's office: ' Do you have a cell phone?'
Yes- but I don't answer it; it takes messages.
To everybody, he's driving and will return my message (or text)
With SEO NUKE... (Score:2)
Re:Somehow I feel. (Score:2)
Not much email (Score:3)
I don't understand how people get so much email. I get maybe 5, maximum 10 private emails per day. At work (or rather at my client because I'm a subcontractor), it's different. One clients did communication at our Scrum stand-up meeting. If I was in the CC for email, I archived it immediately (skipping my inbox). My current client uses Slack, but again, not more than maybe 5 messages per day.
As a colleague said, my job is software development, not email.
If it's because of my role (Score:2)
Auto filtering (Score:3)
If it's worth saving, it's worth filtering into a folder.
Generic ads for companies I do business with have an Ads folder that is emptied periodically. Bill related emails go into a bill folder. That also gets emptied periodically.
People I actually care if I get an email from have a filter for them.
Gmail takes care of spam pretty well on its own.
The inbox just gradually grows as things go into it that never get filtered into something else.
If it's not in a folder, it's probably not that important and if space ever becomes an issue I can do more a thorough clearing out.
People care way too much about the inbox. Labels are where your white listed items go. The inbox is just a grey area that will accumulate over time but can be cleared out if needed.
Zero Inbox (Score:1)
No emails in my inbox, have folders @respond for ones I need to respond to that I can't immediately, @reference for anything I might thing might be useful later, @payment, then several other folders for filtering work stuff I need to keep or auto filter clients to for response later
Emails that come in are dealt with immediately, responded to immediately and moved to @reference if I need to keep or deleted, read immediately if it's a mailing list or deleted if I don't have time (if I don't have time now, I p
I use FILTERS (Score:1)
LIFO - Last in First Out - Always Searchable (Score:1)
make every mailbox disposable (Score:3)
Never use a mailbox that is permanently connected to YOU; your ISP, your work or whatever. OK, you probably have to use your work or school account sometimes- keep it to a minimum.
Use gmail, hotmail, any of the free services. Have one for family, one for friends, one for work, and at lest two for questionable email (people or businesses you may not want to continue with).
The key is that they are all disposable, unlike the one your ISP offers. You can dump any of them and open another if they become too spammy. Simply inform your favored correspondents first using the names associated with that mailbox. They will understand if they've ever received spam.
This assumes that you are using an email program that can manage many accounts in one place. If you've been going to a website with your browser to get your email, you need to reconsider.
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You should never use your ISP's email account. Aside from it being accessible by random ISP staff, if you ever leave that ISP your email address is going to die.
One of the established providers is probably reasonably stable (can you imagine the shitstorm if hotmail.com went away?) but obviously a domain is your best bet. Are there any services that allow non-technical people to register a domain and have email redirect to Gmail/Hotmail/etc. with a few clicks?
infinity? (Score:5, Insightful)
>"Respond to what you can, and ignore the rest. Key to inbox infinity -- telling close contacts and family that your email replies might be slow in coming -- if at all -- as well as alternative ways to reach you"
That is just being an asshole. And what "alternative ways" are more efficient and less annoying? Being interrupted constantly with phone calls or texts? Writing a letter?
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>"No, if they were so concerned they would phone or text."
No, if it weren't that urgent and they were considerate, it would be an Email. Something that can be longer, thoughtful, complete, and easy to reply to in comfort and without as much interruption.
Easy (Score:2)
Ctrl-A, Delete.
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You can. Gmail will allow you to do dots in the email address too, as many as you like, so you can use
e.x.am.p.le+slashdot@gmail.com
and the email will be delivered to the example@gmail.com account. The 'sent to' address doesn't get changed, so you can set up filters and rules if you want.
Very useful.
Marking unread (Score:3)
I have various filters in place to put emails into various folders automatically for me. Most of these folders contain emails that I can ignore (some go directly to the Bin, some are monitoring alert emails, some are status updates on deployment pipelines, some are incidents that my team, but not me, need to work on, etc). I would generally cast a quick eye over these, and when happy I'll just delete everything in the folder.
The rest stay in my InBox.
When I have new emails in there, I read them. If this is something I can reply to now, I reply now. If it's something I can ignore, I just close it and leave it there. If it's something I need to do by can't do now, I close it and mark it as unread so that I'll go back to it at some point.
This means that I generally have a small number of unread emails, listing this that I need to get back to.
Simple process that has worked very well for me for the last 20 years or so.
I employ a similar process in Google Inbox where I'll 'check off' emails that I'm done with. I can't mark emails as 'unread', but if I haven't checked if off then it's something I want to get back to at some point. Unfortunately checking off the email doesn't appear to do much on the GMail side, so when Google shutdown InBox it'll complete mess up my system. So I need to do something about this on the Gmail side before they do that. (rather miffed at Google about this, but that's Google for you...)
Finally! A name for my practice (Score:2)
"Inbox Infinity". Have been practicing this for years. If I don't answer and it's really important, they'll re-email. Or call. Or text. Or send a letter, or the police.
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Different Inbox, different strategy (Score:2)
I maintain 3 inboxes and manage them differently.
1. Private - Inbox Zero
2. Wildcard private email, allowing me to filter into sub-folders (or delete automatically if too much spam) based on destination email - Inbox Infinity, check over it once or twice a day
3. Work email - major rules filtering into a number of sub-folders. Main inbox zero, all sub-folders get different amount of attention (from hourly to weekly attention). I should add that my employer IT already does a good job at filtering out spam fro
Halfway to Zen (Score:2)
For my work account I let the email pile up in the inbox, ie no sorting outside of some filters to pull out journal TOCs and persistent spam, but I make sure I have no unread emails. I use thunderbird which has a good enough (not great) search capability that I don't see the benefit of going through the work to manually sort the email.
In my personal account I just let it pile up and look out for emails from folks I care about. Like others I also have a junk.lastname@gmail.com account that I use when webpag
Slow in coming, if ever? (Score:2)
If that's the way you want to be - unreliable - go for it. You probably also don't pay your bills on time, you miss appointments, and you generally live - let's be polite here - a "happy go lucky" life. Some people do.
OTOH, if you are a generally reliable person, then you just have to add your inbox to the other activities you deal with in daily life. That means sorting through every message, binning the crap, and answering the rest in a timely fashion. The same way you (hopefully!) handle your physical mai
The 90s wants its article back... (Score:2)
I skip email (Score:2)
I just talk to people directly and ask to be reached directly and then deal with things in real time. I get emails as appointment reminders, receipts, if a file needs to be sent to me, but otherwise I am just contacted directly by voice or text.
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Once a week (Score:1)
...sounds good.
If you actually have the discipline to actually do it.
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Yeah, no (Score:2)
Just about everything sent to my work mail is ruled into an archive never to be seen. The rest get read breifly and then sent to the same archive. I will keep the important stuff in a inbox sub folder for later. Keep the yearly archive around til like March.
I had approximately 55GB come into my work account last year. The biggest chuck of my storage is this. Similar amounts the two before it. That
Work Life Balance (Score:1)
None left unread, archive by year-month... (Score:2)
I have my emails back to 2002. I collect various accounts using fetchmail to my local machine. I read them all, delete as necessary. I save them off into folders by month in the format YYYY-MM so they naturally sort. I also archive my sent mail in the same way.
I have 228 in my inbox now, and that is all of Dec and Jan (so far). I archive manually when I feel the need.
If I need to find something, I can just use grep to locate the correct archive, and then either read it in vi or via alpine.
This has work
The Bat! FTW (Score:2)
ASCII, fast & easy (Score:2)
Why not both? (Score:2)
Why not both?
I "file" (label) lots of stuff - and my rules label far more than I manually do.
But I also just let other stuff sit in my Inbox. Not hurting anybody other than taking up a smidgen of space. Can find it via search. Maybe someday if I'm sick or super bored I'll file or delete all 30,000+ ...
Why manage email at all? (Score:2)
If you use GMail, the search is so good you can find anything from 10 years ago in a couple of seconds.
Even Outlook's search is good enough to find most emails quickly (though not nearly as good as GMail).
I just have two kinds of email: Those that are in my inbox still need some attention. Those that don't, I archive. That's it. It's worked for years, never regretted losing all that time trying to file emails in folders that would mystify me later.
Re:It isn't 1995 anymore -- text messages (Score:5, Informative)
So what makes you read text messages, then? In a world of MMS, they can be just as long as an email, but we'll the downside that it's locked down to a single device with a touch interface.