Email sucks. Time saving tips from Kevin Rose

The biggest issue is you have to work out how important email is to what you do + achieve. If you are a developer, it's probably a distraction.

If you are a founder, entrepreneur or similar then your (filtered, non-spam, non-bacn) email is contextual to your business relationships and actually prioritizing your time to properly tend to it is important.

This whole "I have over 1000 unread emails, oh my!" crap just feels like bad email management and poor time keeping.

I filter away all twitter/facebook/plancast auto-notifications, intentionally avoid mailing lists unless there is an RSS option and keep very on top of spam using similar email address tricks (I tend to use <foo>@<mydomain> but it's the same deal).

So with the Spam and Bacn taken care of, I actually am left with a very manageable amount of ham ('real') email every day and so I set aside the appropriate amount of time to deal with it because it is all high-value messages.

Things work out fine, relationships are founded/maintained and I don't have to email people automatically telling them I couldn't be bothered to read their email in 14 days - which would make them look unimportant and me look like a bit of a douche.

GMail users: If you find a site that doesn't like the + character, you can also use strategically placed periods to help direct spam. myemail@gmail.com and m.y.email@gmail.com are all routed to the same account. Just create rules based on the address you give to friends and the one you give to potential spammers.

I've been noodling with an idea for a while, and maybe this is a good time to see people's responses:

We have Spam filters. Why not Content filters? (ok, a ham strainer)

I want unlimited, user-defined bayesian filters for my email. Flag everything political-sounding, and have it (reasonably accurately) filtered - no more FUD chain letters in your main inbox! Flag anything funny - get a humor folder. Flag everything that's a bug report - get a bug report folder. Ultimately, you have an auto-sorting tagging system defined by your needs.

I'm primarily thinking it'd work for people with high-to-very-high email volume, as then the filters would have enough to learn from. But even if it's somewhat inaccurate, pre-sorted mail would be extremely useful to me - you just have to correct it occasionally, instead of correcting it every time.

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More on-topic, the single-most-useful thing I've done to manage my inbox has been to make a "this week" query-based folder. Far fewer things fall out of my attention that way, because it's a reasonable amount to scroll over if I've got a bit of time - something I never did when I had 3k+ in the same view.

All of these tips are generalizations of the same idea: with email, nobody grabs your attention without your consent. This is a new idea in society - you could always get someone's attention by finding them in person, and you could usually reach someone on the telephone. Call screeners and security guards are expensive, so only a few people had them. But now, I can just open up my GMail preferences and have my mail prioritized, flagged, tagged, deleted, and archived without lifting a finger. And malevolent emails are filtered out by someone else! At the end of the day, effectively dealing with email is like programming - when something sucks, automate it.

Tip 6. Stop routing a ton of noise into your primary email accounts, use something like OtherInbox.com for trivial stuff such as Twitter and Facebook notifications.

If you get that much email you have issues larger than what you do with those thousand emails. The root problem is that you got a thousand emails. Address that.

e.g. Instead of address+foo@domain.tld - try not signing up for shady lists in the first place. Has anything of value come out of a newsletter from a dicey web site?

Curious: how many of those thousands of messages are actually personal and worth reading? How many are notifications from stores, social sites, and so on? (Programmers only:) How many are notifications from your apps, giving you updates about processes you're running?

I find it incredibly hard to understand how anyone could have a thousand personal worthwhile messages coming in every day. I guess an Internet celebrity (or famous angel investor!) would have a large number of contact attempts each day, but that counts as work email, right? (The author's post says "1002 unread personal".)

i've been "inbox zero" since i was introduced to email (c. 1994, on my dad's university vms account). my inbox contains only messages requiring some action (either reply or something external). everything else goes into the trash ("bacn", e.g. update notices for software i don't use anymore, bank newsletters, etc.) or into a folder (or is just "archived" in the case of gmail). i really don't understand why so many people have so much trouble coping with their email. i used to spot english majors by their enormous inboxes when i was in college....

correction to tip #2: the plus trick (username+foo@example.org) works with many mail systems not just gmail (as stated). its origins predate gmail.

correction to tip #4: iPhone's append "Sent from my iPhone" not "Sent from iPhone". i'd notice the missing "my". "Sent from my mobile." is just fine and probably a better approach.

This is what I do for my work email:

1. I create rules for every Exchange DL that I consider important. This is the first line of defense.

2. Any email that I receive that I am not in the to or cc line is sent to a "Check Later" email folder. Either someone bcc'd me, or someone (maybe me) adding me to a DL that I didn't create a rule for.

3. My Inbox should contain only mail that is directly to me.

4. Any mail in my Inbox that is not actionable (either I'm done with it or it's informational) is filed away.

Of course, these strategies only work for certain people (I'm just a cog in a machine), but it has done wonders for keeping my Inbox manageable. I rely heavily on Outlook Search to find mails that I remember seeing but have filed away (I have a single "I've read these mails and want to keep them" folder).

One thing I've been wanting to mention at HN but don't think is worth starting a thread for is how bad email is for task / project management, and how much I think there's room for an alternative.

My running dream is that it would be web based (but not a todo list) and would be based on the idea of a project built of tasks with definite finishing points, and subprojects, and the ability to direct other people to them and ask/answer questions, make notes, verify things and confirm tasks are complete.

I picture it in my head as Etherpad meets old-school vertical scrolling 2D games meets Gantt charts meets braiding ( http://theautry.org/ortega/images/four_string_braid.jpg ), I guess meets Google Wave though I've never used it.

The braids go to other people "request input from Alice, then verification from Bob, then back to me for implementation", and as the "view" scrolls, the completed tasks are fixed in time and cannot be altered, but can be brought back up to the front for reattention.

I put it here so I can note it somewhere and because it's related to how annoying email is to use for ongoing work between people. I'm suspicious that it's impractical if delved into in any depth, and that the good bits are done in some existing tracker / helpdesk / ticket / project management software if I knew how to look for that kind of thing.

The best way to reduce the amount of email you get is to reduce the amount you send. Works like a charm.

I used to have two places to check for all of that semi-automated "I'd like to read this but it isn't urgent" material: my email inbox (mailing lists, newsletters, etc) and my RSS reader.

The fix -- a quick'n'dirty script that moves all those emails over to RSS: http://github.com/danshoutis/mail-to-rss

Caveat: if you're using Google Reader, you need to put the output RSS+HTML into a non-password-protected place, which means someone who can guess the URL can read your stuff. (For maximum convenience, I'm just dumping it into the public folder of my dropbox account.)

It certainly needs polishing, but not so much that I've felt the need to work on it recently. :)

I can think of three tips that are more useful than any of the ones in the article:

1. Don't subscribe to mailing lists. Really, don't.

2. Answer yes or no questions with a yes or a no.

3. Don't reply if the email doesn't require (or warrant) a response.

At the risk of double entry...

Regarding 3) VIP filter -- That's how I'm currently using AwayFind [1] with my GMail in Google Apps. My most frequent VIP filter is {if they reply today} but for some people I'll do {if they reply this week} and I get a phone call and it's read back to me. The context and timing is the important thing for me. The really powerful feature is specific words (optional) but I'm presently inclined to rely on my own reply behavior to set the tone of my perceived inbox. It's pretty addicting.

[1] #include 'disclaimer.h' /* I'm an advisor */

I use the X1 search program to make my life a lot easier. At my office we have to use Outlook, X1 makes using email like having your own local copy of Gmail.

Doesn't really help with huge volumes of email, but it does help when you have to find that email you were sent last week along with 7000 other emails.

Why not create a mail with a 250 character limit. Or forget the limits, something like the facebook stream, but a lot more private just like email. Not sure if such a service exists today..something like a Short Message Service implemented with email protocols.

Rather then put a +spam on the end I give a unique email out to every place that asks for it. Then I filter on that "To" address with labels. Makes it easy to scan.

Then I follow GTD of having an empty email box.

heh, #4 is from me.

Wasn't a big fan of this post. it would have been more interesting if he showed some examples of his three sentence replies to actual emails. 3 sentence emails sound great in theory, but really after a while if you are sending such short responses you are just an email mass producing factory.

I've been on the receiving end of some short/terse emails and I have to say that my impression is not positive. I understand people are busy, but when I read short replies to emails that don't make sense it doesn't make me feel special at all :(

I don't read tiny white text on black backgrounds. I don't care who wrote it, or what it purports to say. Period.