Sanebox is an awesome service. It has reduced my email woes to almost nil.
How To Win At Email
21–30 of 51 posts
Re: How To Win At Email
#22We have a saying, "If you're getting too many emails, then you're not good enough at Gmail."
Especially with keyboard shortcuts, I can glance at the important emails, check any others that catch my eye, and then archive/mark the rest. Priority inbox, labels, etc. became almost automatic mental cues to check or delete email.
Re: How To Win At Email
#23The #1 thing that has helped me to keep emails organized is taking advantage of the + notation that gmail allows... Every store or website I give my email address to, I simply append (emailaddress+storename@gmail.com) to my email address, which allows for easy filtering later. It also shows me who has been giving out my email address :)
A significant amount of websites filter on the + and will throw an error as an invalid character in the email string. Very annoying.
A worse system (read: hack) is to put variable amounts of dots in your email address when you sign up for something, because Gmail strips dots from your account name when delivering your mail. It requires you to remember or write down who got what amount of dots though.
Re: How To Win At Email
#24The #1 thing that has helped me to keep emails organized is taking advantage of the + notation that gmail allows... Every store or website I give my email address to, I simply append (emailaddress+storename@gmail.com) to my email address, which allows for easy filtering later. It also shows me who has been giving out my email address :)
A significant amount of websites filter on the + and will throw an error as an invalid character in the email string. Very annoying.
A worse system (read: hack) is to put variable amounts of dots in your email address when you sign up for something, because Gmail strips dots from your account name when delivering your mail. It requires you to remember or write down who got what amount of dots though.
Re: How To Win At Email
#25The #1 thing that has helped me to keep emails organized is taking advantage of the + notation that gmail allows... Every store or website I give my email address to, I simply append (emailaddress+storename@gmail.com) to my email address, which allows for easy filtering later. It also shows me who has been giving out my email address :)
A significant amount of websites filter on the + and will throw an error as an invalid character in the email string. Very annoying.
For most, I use sneak+tag@mydomain (Google Apps), but for those, they all get bucketed into my special noncompliant@mydomain email to guard against the eventuality of one of them selling me out.
Re: How To Win At Email
#26The best thing I ever did in Gmail was filter the word "unsubscribe" to skip the inbox and go into a "Newsletters" label. Whenever I peek in there I see nothing but garbage, dozens of emails a day that I wouldn't have cared about. Right now it's sitting at 5,162 unread emails. It keeps my inbox almost always being things that are relevant or interesting. I've shared this with a few friends who love it. It's pretty fl…
That filter doesn't prevent you from reading email lists?
Yeah that's been the one down-side. I've had to add an exception for the one email list I'm a part of.
Re: How To Win At Email
#27The best thing I ever did in Gmail was filter the word "unsubscribe" to skip the inbox and go into a "Newsletters" label. Whenever I peek in there I see nothing but garbage, dozens of emails a day that I wouldn't have cared about. Right now it's sitting at 5,162 unread emails. It keeps my inbox almost always being things that are relevant or interesting. I've shared this with a few friends who love it. It's pretty fl…
I know it's silly, but this made me giggle: "It's never caused me to miss any important emails (that I'm aware of)."
Re: How To Win At Email
#28The #1 thing that has helped me to keep emails organized is taking advantage of the + notation that gmail allows... Every store or website I give my email address to, I simply append (emailaddress+storename@gmail.com) to my email address, which allows for easy filtering later. It also shows me who has been giving out my email address :)
I do something similar with `storename@mydomain.com`, which all get filtered to the same `me@mydomain.com` which is imported into my gmail.
I get very strange looks whenever I give out my email address in person. But you're right; it's an excellent way to track who gives out my email and it's an easy way to block spam that gets through the filter.
Re: How To Win At Email
#29"STOP. Right now."
I dislike this new trend which consist of SHOUTING at your reader and ordering them to do or not do something (for their own good, obviously).
This is used to give some weight to very dull advices, like when you should or ~n't read your emails, which books to buy, etc. Strangely enough, genuinely useful advices about important topics like how to educate your kids or how to behave in foreign countries do not need to be SHOUTED at the readership.
Re: How To Win At Email
#30I'll just put this here: http://www.streak.com It's pretty awesome at this kind of email management stuff right inside gmail.
I was/am a big fan and a power user. I think it's worth pointing out around two weeks ago Streak automatically put a signature file into any Streak based email without asking you to opt in. I thought suddenly dropping "Lovingly managed by Streak" as a new signature file without permission showed poor judgement or desperation.
Co-founder of Streak here. Chalk that one up to poor judgement. We definitely screwed up with that one and are really friggin sorry about that.
We gave settings to disable that when it launched, but that was obviously not sufficient especially since it was on by default. After it started to roll out and we got complaints pretty much instantly, we turned it off within a few hours.
So ya, if this soured you permanent off of Streak then obviously that sucks big time. We definitely learned our lesson though, so hopefully we get one mulligan.