CCNC/CCNC Module 7/Mail Management/Techniques

Techiques
Recognize some techniques to manage e-mail effectively such as creating and naming folders, moving messages to appropriate folders, deleting unrequired e-mail, using address lists.

If you use email as a regular feature of your daily work, it is quite possible that you will receive 50 or 100 emails in a day. Over a period of a few months, this adds up to thousands of emails. Obviously the frequent user will need to develop strategies not only for dealing with received mail, but also for sending mail.

Mail folders are to email what directories are to files. You can create mail folders in which you store incoming and outgoing mail. Often users are careful about creating folders for incoming mail but forget completely about organizing outgoing mail. Copies of outgoing mail are allowed to accumulate in the Sent folder. One way of dealing with this is to create a folder for a particular category and then create two sub-folders within this for incoming mail and copies of outgoing mail.

Sometimes you may receive so much mail for a particular category that it needs to be divided into sub-categories which in turn have in-coming and out-going sub-folders. This will be illustrated in the section called “Create a new folder for mail”.

When you create folders give them meaningful names.

You can modify your folder structure on an on-going basis and drag mail from one folder to the next.

Delete unwanted mail. Only keep mail that you need to keep a record of. As a security measure against viruses you may want to delete mail from suspicious sources without opening it.

If you find you are receiving spam, consider making use of anti-spam software that will block spam from known sources.

Make use of address / distribution lists to send email to groups of recipients. Instead of having to type a list of email addresses, you only need to enter the name of the distribution list.