Inbox under control

[jbailey]

I have my email inbox finally under control. I started with 3000-odd messages in my Inbox a few weeks ago, and decided that I wanted to get my Inbox truly down to messages I hadn't replied to but intended to. I had a few still from when we moved a year ago, and I got to the last of those today - and found out that she's on LJ as well (Hi, Peggy!)

After this, the only one that's not from sometime in the last past week is a message about HPPA ELF ABI documents and LSB.

With some luck I'll be able to keep it this way!

Comments

[compwizrd.livejournal.com]

I get about 1500 a day give or take, luckily it mostly goes to a separate account.. it's painful when i forget about that account for a week or two.

[jbailey.livejournal.com]

I was at that point, and decided that I needed to cut it down to messages I was actually going to care about. So I'm now on a few mailing lists that I actually read, or that I have to be on to post occasionally. I'm going through and eliminating email addresses that I don't use to kill a bunch of the spam coming in, and I've finally knocked the email account down to 6 or 7 messages in the Inbox that I need to deal with. I think I'm down to 300 or 400 messages a day, over half of which I now actually read, and a bunch of the rest is spam that makes it through the filters. A next step will be to tweak those.

I have this particular problem that I hate using a mail reader for mailing lists - I wish that those all nicely came into a news reader that was threaded, had history, and had a decent search.

Sadly, I'm also missing a decent news reader, which is why I don't just use gmane for everything. =)

[nothingontv.livejournal.com]

May I suggest a new approach (but one you seem to have hinted on):

Read through all messages in your inbox.
For any emails you need to respond to, move to a "Needs Response" folder.
For any emails you need to save, move to a "Saved" folder.
Clean your inbox out. That way, you know what needs responding/proper reading, and what is bilge!

[jbailey.livejournal.com]

For the saved emails, I have an Inbox-2006, Inbox-2005, etc. For the needs response, I'm trying to just use the Inbox for that. If I have more than 4 or 5 things that need a response and I'm behind on them, I'm screwed anyway - mostly because if it's so big that I can't respond to it right now then it's probably going to take me a while to answer it, and having them queue up elsewhere isn't going to make that easier.

So far I've been holding my own on this, though. The hardest part has actually been sorting it down to *this* point.

Keep up the outstanding work and thank you

[(Anonymous)]

Cool!..
Nice work...