What do you do with the email once you’ve read and processed it?

(this was asked by a user today and it seemed like a topic screaming out for a blog post)

First, that’s a good question.

I’m a big fan of INBOX zero so I do strongly suggest moving your processed INBOX email out of that folder.  See my comment below about were to put it.

Having said that, I don’t think you need to be compelled to clean out your unimportant folders. SaneLater zero just doesn’t have the same zing.

Filing is mostly a waste of energy (unless your email client doesn’t search very well).   Filing is the equivalent of Yahoo! directories in 1995.  Since key word search didn’t work you had to manually go thru a tree of folders to see where your information might be.  (not to self:  I should blog about how to effectively key word search in each mail client)

So… file into large bins.  Don’t file by any criteria that you can easily search for.   So… file into an”Archive” folder or “SalesLeads”, “Receipts” (or something else equally large.)  SaneBox archives into a single existing Archive folder or if none exists we create a folder called SaneArchive.

Don’t delete email unless it has a large attachment that you have on disk somewhere else. Or you are in one of those awful threads where people keep emailing you versions of word documents.  In that case, the originator of that email is causing a huge configuration management issue by creating a zillion versions of the same document held in a zillion email accounts.  So, you are welcome to delete the old ones.  Word should already have the edit history in it internally so the latest version is the one to keep. Disk is cheap and memory is fragile so don’t delete your email.

SaneBox will automatically cycle your oldest emails into SaneArchive for you so no need to do that manually.  We leave your latest 5000 emails in your Sane folders and move the rest to SaneArchive.  Think of that as your attic (but an attic you can search using key words).

And I do find that many users just let the SaneLater stuff build up and get cycled into SaneArchive.   That does seem to be the most energy and time efficient mode.  When you get the email summary digest each day feel free to click“Archive All” if you want to make that process go faster :-)

Happy Day Light Savings Day to all,

Stuart

Stuart Roseman

President/Founder SaneBox

POP and IMAP

As SaneBox gets more popular, we are starting to realize that far, far, far more people use POP to view their email that I would have ever thought possible. SaneBox will not work properly if you download your email using POP. SaneBox will only work if your client uses IMAP or one of the proprietary Exchange protocols.

What is POP anyway?

For those that don’t know, POP is an old, late 1980’s protocol that simply downloads your emails to your computer and ignores the server for any other purpose. POP has two modes: it can delete emails from the server after downloading or it can leave them on the server.

The death knell for POP should have been the advent of multiple devices that all need to access your email: your laptop, smartphone, desktop and web browser. If you only ever check your email from one place, POP is okay (until your device crashes, then poof all your email is gone) but using it with multiple devices is pure torture.

Imagine you are downloading your Yahoo! email with POP to your laptop, desktop, and smartphone.  What do you see when you go to the web interface?  Well… you will see an endless series of unread emails with no indication of which you deleted, read, flagged, filed. And none of your email folders.

So what do you do? Well, you probably rush around to each desktop, laptop, and smartphone deleting or filing the same emails over and over again. And we feel so badly for the steady stream of SaneBox users that find them in this very situation. And to add insult to injury, SaneBox won’t be able to help them until they get off the POP wagon.

What can I do?

If you find yourself in this situation your life will be a whole lot easier if you convert every desktop, laptop, and smartphone you use to check your email to use the IMAP protocol.

How do I convert to IMAP?

First, don’t panic. In theory, this should be easy and relatively straight-forward.

Each email client is different but the general idea is that you add an new email account using the same username, password, and mail server name but using the IMAP protocol. You may have to click on Advanced Settings or something similar in order to switch mail protocols in your client. Gmail has a good rundown of how to configure an IMAP server in various email clients, but be sure to use the correct username and mail server name for your email provider.

Now, what do you do about your old email? All that stuff you received before you had this revelation? Well, that all depends on how you deal with your email right now:

  1. I download my email from the server onto a single computer, and delete the copy on the server. None of your old emails are on the server — they all reside locally on your computer, including any folders you have made.

    Simply use your email clients mailbox import feature to upload all of your email back to the server. Then you’re done.

  2. I download my email from the server onto a bunch of desktop, laptops, and smartphones and never go and clear out the server’s INBOX. The server contains all of your email history — or at least as much as your provider will allow you to have. If you want the local copy of your email (i.e. all of the deleting, filing, etc. that you’ve done) to be reflected on the server so you don’t have to process all of your email again you should make a new folder on the server — call it OLD POP MAIL. Copy all your INBOX email into that folder so that your INBOX is empty.

    Then use your email clients mailbox import feature to upload all of your email back to the server. Then you’re done.

    Once you’re certain that all your email is on the server correctly you can delete the folder called OLD POP MAIL.

  3. I download my email from the server onto a bunch of desktop, laptops, and smartphones and I open up my webmail and clear out my INBOX every now and then. You go back to the Yahoo! web interface and clean up from time to time: delete, file, etc… (And we feel really badly for you if you’ve been doing this. Believe us, its more common than you think!)

    You don’t have to do anything. The email on the server probably already reflects what you have on your computer. For completeness you may want to import your Sent Mail folder up to the server so that your full email history is in one place.

Obviously each different mail client will have a slightly different way of doing things. We will try to provide instructions for all of them eventually. For now, you could search for something like “convert POP to IMAP Outlook 2010” or “convert POP to IMAP <your email client and version>”.

If you find a particularly good set of instructions or need more help please let us know at support@sanebox.com.

Why some people need an email intervention

I have an old friend who has always had trouble keeping up with his email.  Let’s call him FooBar. FooBar get’s a **lot** of email. And it was his email woes, in addition to that of other friends, that caused me to create http://sanebox.com.  

No I’m not going to mention FooBar by name.  He is a good guy with this one little foible: he thinks every single email might be crucial to his life.

To understand this story you have to know that SaneBox makes decisions about what is “important” email and what is “unimportant” email.  This is a GTD type decision based on what needs your attention right now versus what can wait.  And SaneBox has layers of importance so we distinguish things that can wait a little with things that can wait a longer while.

SaneBox moves the “unimportant” emails automatically out of your INBOX to your SaneLater folder.

FooBar can’t admit that focusing and keeping up with the important stuff is worth letting one email wait a couple of hours.  And this is The Problem.

SaneBox users are supposed to scan their “unimportant” email at least once a dayto make sure that a timely issue hasn’t slipped in there.  We can send a digest to your INBOX once or several times a day to make that triage easier. But, you still have to admit to yourself that it is OK if something out-of-the-blue from someone-you-have-no-real-connection-to comes in and waits a few hours until you have time to notice it.

I find that the everything-is-important people are often the leave-email-in-their-INBOX people. They use the read flag to indicate that they already triaged that particular email. THIS IS CRAZY and will lead to email INSANITY. Touch your email as few times as possible.  If you’ve opened it and you can deal with it, deal with it (read,forward,reply and then defer,delete,archive,file).  GET IT OUT OF YOUR INBOX!  

There is the occasional email that will take more time than you have now. SaneBox has defer folders for this. You put the email in one of our defer folders and it disappears from your INBOX until the time you have specified.  Whenever you read an email and leave it in your INBOX it forces you to scroll passed it every single time you look in your INBOX.  And let’s be honest you look there A LOT.

So, this is a public plee to my email challenged friends and all those out there that areeverything-is-important people (especially FooBar). Please acknowledge that you are only human and some things deserve your attention right now and some things don’t.  Go sign up for http://SaneBox.com.