Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Asks: How Do You Manage Your Inbox? (npr.org)
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've jumped on the buzzword bandwagon and let AI manage it for me.
Automatically move emails to the appropriate inbox from the main inbox.
Computors is good at sorting - let them do it for you.
Just saying it like it are.
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.
I'm not very well organised, so it won't come as a surprise that I embraced the "Inbox Infinity" right from the start. Every year or so, I "archive" stuff. Meaning: everything older than, say, a year, will go to a folder in my archive for that year. In a couple of months I'll create the folder 2018 and move everything of 2018 from both Inbox and Sent to it, and I'm done. Very easy to maintain, only takes a few minutes work every year. Very Zen indeed. Sure, at least 95% of all that "archive" is clutter, but who cares? I host my own e-mail and diskspace is cheap.
Woefdram, l'apprenti sorcier
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)
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
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!
#DeleteChrome
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Work Safe Porn
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.
...omphaloskepsis often...
>"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?
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...)
I still use pine in an 80x24. It processes the âDâ(TM) key as fast as my finger can tap. No fancy modern GUI will match the reflexes I spent my entire childhood training on videogames. But xterm can!