Last week we talked about our “growing” email problem. The average size of an individual email as well as the overall volume has increased substantially over the years, and some parts of the email technology platform have changed to accommodate that. In other critical areas it has only barely kept pace or fallen woefully behind. Though it’s changed its look over the years, Outlook still works essentially the same way it did nearly 20 years ago. And while we have more ways to read our email now with the proliferation of mobile devices and cellular data networks, I rarely come across a business professional who isn’t struggling to stay afloat in the growing email tide.
So how do we address this weighty issue?
First off, reduce the volume in any way you can:
- Better spam filters – the best ones work at the server level, and don’t rely on your local email client. If you are using a local spam filter on top of your provider’s “filter”, you need to adjust the settings on the server side so they never get delivered, or change providers. It’s a hassle, but a good spam filter will make it all worthwhile.
- Ditch the mailing lists – if you spend more time shuffling unread newsletters into the “later” folder, you should either look at subscribing to a less frequent digest, or unsubscribe altogether. Ironic advice coming from someone who sends a newsletter. Hopefully because you are reading this, our newsletter makes the cut.
- Separate business and personal – modern email clients and mobile devices allow you to stay on top of multiple email accounts, so there’s no good reason to keep everything in the same mailbox. Don’t go hog wild (5 separate mailboxes is just as bad as single overstuffed box), but if you are using your business mailbox for everything, you really need to move the personal stuff to a separate email account.
- Delete, don’t archive – once you get over the initial fear of throwing away an email permanently, you may find it amazingly liberating and a great way to reduce stress. Be mindful of your company’s retention policy and business practices, but delete anything that isn’t critical. Because it’s “virtual”, email becomes a convenient way for our “inner hoarder” to manifest itself. As with anything hoarded, the volume rapid overtakes any benefit gained from keeping the stuff around. Be merciless, even cruel, and give your delete key a solid workout.
A lot of you have heard this advice before (probably from me), but it always bears repeating. The only way to drink from a firehose is to reduce the pressure. Getting in front of your daily email workload will grant you time to focus on the next task: sorting, filing and putting to use the email you do decide to keep.
Make sure to stop in next week for the final part of our series on taming the email retention beast!
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Believe it or not, email has been around since the 1960’s, though it didn’t make its way into mainstream business culture until the early 1990’s. Judging from some inboxes I’ve come across, some of you might actually have email dating back that far. Depending on your industry, this may or may not be necessary, but storing and keeping that much email usable is almost a universal problem that smaller businesses and individuals struggle with daily.
Are you impacted?
Some of you may be asking, “I’ve been storing email in Outlook for years and it’s only a problem now?” This isn’t a sudden, unexpected crisis, but one that has been growing (pun intended) for some time. Lately I’m seeing more and more folks hit “critical mass” and it’s due to the coincidental rise of several technology factors:
- Mobile devices with increasingly higher-resolution cameras. The iPhone can take an 8MB photo, and a 43MB panoramic photo. As a reference, GoDaddy’s email attachment limit is 20MB, and Gmail’s is 25MB. Whether their reason for sharing several high-res photos via email is for business or pleasure, a handful will put most people right over their size limit and capabilities of Outlook.
- Faster internet connections. We don’t think twice about sending larger files via email, or multiple emails to get around the attachment limits.
- The rapidly diminishing cost of storage, both in physical media like hard drives and on cloud platforms like DropBox, iCloud, SkyDrive, etc. This encourages to disregard file size, something that email (remember the tech is over 50 years old) was never designed to handle.
Combine the above with email archives going back years and you can end up with an inbox grossly over the limit. Overly large email boxes (and large email attachments) can lead to noticeable performance degradation, especially in the corporate poster child of email clients, Microsoft Outlook. Depending on your server limits, you may have been forced to move your old emails to one or more archives, which, when they too become oversized, can also lead to headaches and data loss.
Next week: we discuss how to solve this thorny problem.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net