I get a lot of email everyday. And by a lot, I mean that it totals into the thousands of items*. Seriously. Much of this is addressed to various internal mailing lists to which I subscribe, such as an Xbox Discussion alias, or Visual Studio UI discussions. But, even then, I probably get a few hundred mails per day addressed directly to me.
There are a few important rules of email ettiquette that, if observed, would decrease my incoming mail rate, and make my life far better. MSN Lifesyle for Men, of all things, describes these rules in explicit detail:
Some people think out loud on issues of moderate import for 300 e-mails. And I’m in on all of them, because some doofus copied me on e-mail number one. E-mail should be used to inform, to resolve an issue, to end a conversation, to pass along a job, or to get out of something minor, without the need for personal interaction.
Study these rules. Live them. Love them. You’ll make me (and your coworkers) much happier for it.
* Despite its warts, Outlook is the best email application I have ever used. There is no way I could manage this glut of information with any other mail application. Period. Between the Search Folders and the new super-fast search mechanism, I’m actually able to stay on top of my mail. Whew.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Aaron Ballman // Dec 13, 2006 at 11:03 am
I tried using Windows Mail this week (which is essentially Outlook on Vista, I believe) and was entirely unable to get it to work. It seems that SMTP authentication on non-standard ports is broken. I whipped up a quick REALbasic app which authenticated me on port 2525 and it worked fine. Trying the same thing from Windows Mail would give me relay errors. So I just went back to Thunderbird, which has always served me well (and does work properly). What sort of problems have you encountered with Thunderbird to cause you to like Outlook more?
2 Aaron Brethorst // Dec 13, 2006 at 11:32 am
Windows Mail is more or less Outlook Express v7.0. Outlook is a wholly separate beast. I actually do use Thunderbird at home for checking my personal mail, but it’s always felt really slow to me for IMAP. Moving items to the trash, for instance, causes pauses of a couple seconds. It might be my mail server, but Apple Mail doesn’t have the same issue.
Outlook 2007 has a lot of fantastic functionality for managing huge quantities of mail on an Exchange server. Searching, sorting, and the like are all super-easy.
3 Aaron Ballman // Dec 13, 2006 at 2:42 pm
Ah, I don’t use IMAP, so that may explain the differences right off the bat. I used to get upwards of 1000 messages in a weekend back in my hay-day on the RB mailing lists (among others), and I’ve been using Thunderbird with no issues for a long time to deal with it.
And I should have read your post harder — I assumed Outlook Express instead of Outlook.
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