Whether you’re a working professional, a student, stay at home parent, a retiree or anyone else with access to the Internet chances are you’re an avid emailer.
Continue reading “100 Email Hacks: Become an Inbox Zero Superhero!”
Category: Email
SaneBlackHole Answers the Woes of Unsubscribing From Email
The Woes of Unsubscribing
Unsubscribing is a pain. It takes several clicks, and doesn’t always work. Unfortunately with the amount of spam everyone gets on a daily basis it’s become a necessary part of our lives.
What’s worse, some not-so-nice senders will realize you’re a real person and that you actually check your email – and they will put you on more spammy mailing lists. It happens way more often than you think!
Scary Spam Statistics:
- Spam accounts for 14.5 billion emails a day world wide
- This is 45% of all emails (Many research companies believe this number is in fact higher)
- 90% of spam is in English, 96% a year ago, so I guess this means spam is getting more “international.”
- The US is by far the largest generator of spam email at 15%
- India comes in second at around 7%
- Advertising related spam accounts for 36% of all spam emails
- Adult related subject matters come in at second at 31%
- Only 2.5% of spam emails fall under the scam & fraud category
- The Radicati Research Group in Palo Alto found that spam costs businesses $20.5 billion annually
- Nucleus Research estimates approximately $1934 is lost per employee because of spam
You may be asking yourself what’s one to do? Well, there are several options. The first is to simply be very careful about handing out your email address, which means limiting the news letters and promotions you signup for, and the services and membership sites you join. Limiting your email’s exposure is the first step in reducing the amount of spam you receive.
There are also several services that enable a quick and safe way for people to unsubscribe and prevent undesired emails from entering their inbox. SaneBox is one of those services, their BlackHole feature allows users to stop unwanted emails from bothering them (it won’t unsubscribe you, but all future emails will go straight to trash). Whether you utilize existing services or tools to manage spam or simply change your email habits, it’s important to do something. Processing spam is a huge time suck and kills productivity, do something before you’re neck deep in it!
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(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
Tech Talk: Email Isn’t Going Anywhere [Video]
Email isn’t going anywhere
With over 3 billion email accounts word wide and just under 300 billion messages sent each day, email is one of the most popular and widely used forms of communication today.
Although email is a fast, easy, and inexpensive form of communication , it is tainted with incredible inefficiencies. The reason for this is largely due to lack of knowledge surrounding email etiquette. People have become lazy with how they interact and engage with email, which results in massive amounts of wasted time.
Every industry is hurt by poor email habits and etiquette. Whether you’re a real estate agent, lawyer, doctor, entrepreneur, teacher or any other professional your productivity has been crippled by how you and your colleagues interact and process email.
Constant interruptions kill productivity
Our ability as humans to concentrate is severely impacted by constant interruptions. Focusing on any task, no matter the complexity is difficult while constantly being interrupted by emails. A case study conducted by the Danwood Group found it takes 1.5 minutes on average to read and recover from an email. The Danwood Group case study provides a very insightful example of this dilemma and it is as follows:
Lets say an employee is alerted every 5 minutes when they receive new mail, which means there’s potential for 96 interruptions in a regular 8-hour workday. If it takes 1.5 minutes to read and recover from an email this leaves 3.5 minutes until the employee is interrupted again. Now lets say this same employee changes the alert to go off every 45 minutes instead of 5, this means interruptions decrease to 11 per day. If 9 emails accumulated over 45 minutes it will take 6 minutes on average to read and recover from the interruption, which leaves 39 minutes until the next interruption.
Fixing The Problem
Each and every industry experiences email overload to a certain degree and it’s imperative that companies and individuals implement systems and good habits surrounding email to combat it as much as possible. Services like SaneBox are especially attractive to professionals in fields that require large amounts of communication such as Real Estate. There are lots of great email services out there, but the most important thing to remember when processing email is to set specific times to check email and to not allow yourself to get distracted by unimportant emails. SaneBox, for instance, helps real estate agents and other professionals prioritize their emails automatically by sending non-urgent, unimportant emails to a sub folder where they can process these emails in bulk much more efficiently and effectively at their leisure.
Email has become such a problem recently, because people have acquired bad habits in the way they process and deal with email in general. Like we all know, bad habits are hard to break, but if you are conscious of your interactions with email these bad habits will become more and more obvious and solutions will present themselves. Becoming an effective emailer will save you substantial amounts of time, so read up on new strategies and helpful pointers as often as possible and implement what you learn, figure out what works and cut what doesn’t.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
Email Filing & Reminders: The World Is Divided
The World is Divided
There are literally billions of people using email today, but every one of those individuals can be categorized into one of two groups, filer or non-filer.
Non-filers are those people who keep every message they’ve ever received in their inbox. It’s hard to believe these people exist, the thought of it almost gives me a nervous breakdown, but trust us, they’re out there.
Filers are the people who file messages out of their inbox into folders. The complexity of these filing systems ranges from several folders to dozens.
Over the past two decades, there have been heated debates on which method is more effective. Filers have been accused of wasting too much time organizing their inbox, while non-filers have been called unorganized and sloppy.
Both strategies have their drawbacks, which is why you should try to find a happy medium between the two. Leaving every message in your inbox is a good idea in theory because they’re all right in front of you, but the problem is they aren’t prioritized and if you have more than a dozen or so messages they can easily get lost in the shuffle. On the other side, having folders is helpful for organizing your mail into buckets to ensure easy accessibility, but any message that requires action should remain in your inbox until that action has been taken.
Bottom line: It’s advantageous to have several general folders meant for filing once actions have been taken or for storing reference-type emails. Don’t go overboard with folders though, because an overly complex filing system quickly loses it’s effectiveness. A good rule of thumb is once an email is opened execute an action before moving on to the next email or task. does it need to be stored for reference? do you need to respond? Take action on each message before moving on.
The Other Side:
Although we’ve outlined some effective email processing tactics, the other side of emailing must be addressed as well, which is sending email. All too often people send emails that require a response, but none is given. This could be for a variety of reasons of course, perhaps the recipient simply forgot, they’re busy or they just don’t want to hear from you. Either way you should implement a system that helps you keep track of your sent mail. The email service SaneBox offers such a system with their SaneReminders feature that enables senders to Cc or Bcc a specific time or date they need a response by, if it doesn’t happen by the specified time their email is sent back to them. Boomerang for Gmail also offers a similar system that helps users set reminders for themselves.
If signing up for such a service isn’t your cup of tea consider creating a Google spreadsheet or Excel doc that helps keep track of the important emails you’ve sent out. Find a system that works best for you and stick to it, forgetting about a message because you never got a response shouldn’t be a problem in your email life!
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
Gmail Lockdown
Has you ever seen this screen?
I saw it a few months ago for about 24 hours. It sucked. Imagine not having access to your email for 24 hours, with nobody to reach out to and no info given. Although Google makes it seem like it’s your fault, it’ really isn’t. Chances are the server your Gmail account happens to be on is just having a bad day – there’s absolutely nothing you did to cause this, and there’s even less you can do to fix it.
But here’s how you can protect yourself from this unfortunate situation: just forward your regular Gmail to another Gmail address. It’s most likely to be on a different machine, and chances of both of your accounts getting locked down are very small.
Email Hack of the Week: Bold Key Sentences
If your email is longer than a couple of sentences, consider bolding the parts that you need a response on, or are critical for the recipient to understand. Think about it: you want to make life as easy as possible for the reader and avoid any miscommunication. So rather reading over your email several times, they can right away know what they need to do. Of course, don’t go overboard and highlight every other sentence.
Gmail: Tips, Tricks & Shortcuts Oh My!
Gmail is an outstanding email client with many features and shortcuts that most of us don’t even know exist. Today, we will cover some of these great Gmail tricks. Even if you consider yourself a Gmail expert, we are almost 100% confident you’ll find something new and exciting!
Tweaking Gmail’s New Layout
The new interface gives you a bit more control over the way your inbox looks, which means you can further customize Gmail to suit your preferences. Here are a few of the things you can do:
The Shift-Click
If you want to select several messages at once to move or delete, you don’t need to check every individual email box. Just check the topmost box of the first email you want to select then hold the “Shift” key down and check the last email you want to select. All the email in-between will also be selected.
Keyboard Shortcuts
You can navigate Gmail without even touching your mouse. To enable keyboard shortcuts click on the “General” tab in Gmail settings and then select the “Enable Keyboard Shortcuts.”
“K” moves up- use the “k” key to move your screen up while checking your Gmail.
“J” moves down – Use the “j” key to scroll down.
“o” opens your messages.
“s” allows you to star messages.
“!” lets you move a message to the spam folder
“e” saves a message
“#” deletes messages.
These are just a few of the keyboard shortcuts. You can see other keyboard shortcuts with a cheat sheet that appears by tapping the “Shift” and “+” or “/”.
Advanced Searches
Perform advanced searches in your inbox. For instances if you needed to find a message from Jason with a subject of “business app” then you would type the following: from: Jason subject: “business app” to find it. Below are a few more tips to help you search your email more efficiently:
- Click the down arrow in the “Show search options” in the search field.
- Search for names using “from:” followed by the name you are looking for.
- Search using “to” in front of the recipients name when you want to find email from a sender.
- Type “Subject” and then the subject term, when you want to find email with a particular subject.
- Search for a particular phrase within an email by adding quotation marks to the phrase when searching for it.
- Check the “Has attachment” box to list emails that only have attachments.
Labs
Go to Settings, click on the Labs tab, and be blown away. There are a ton of useful feature, but my favorite is “Undo Send”. It’s amazing. It gives you 5-30 seconds to undo sending any email you’re having second thoughts about. I use it at least once a day!
3rd party add-ons
Finally, there are a million 3rd party plugins for Gmail. We highly recommend Rapportive and WriteThatName. And, of course, SaneBox works as well with Gmail as any other email service.
We’ve only brushed the surface of Gmail tips and tricks, but implementing these will save you time and reduce the daily hassle you experience with your inbox. Have fun!
Sincerely,
The SaneBox Team
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