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Comment by forgingahead | Hacker News Reader

How does that work with the emails he actually needs to receive from his own internal staff though? Having a separate email that he actually uses for daily work ("notjeff@amazon.com")? I can't imagine having my customers and my colleagues bombard me at one email account and effectively staying on top of everything.

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When he was actively CEO, he had an entire team devoted to sorting through those emails. They would filter the obvious spam and send the genuine customer complaints directly to him. Which usually led to the infamous question mark emails and a lot of people scrambling to resolve the issue and ensure it remained resolved. (The only time I've seen a question mark email have more than just question mark was when Jeff noticed this was a repeat problem from a previous question mark email.)

I think you'll find that quite a few senior execs don't actually handle their own email inbox. Just as they have an executive assistant to jealously guard their calendar and book all their meetings, someone is actively fielding their emails, dealing with the trivialities and junk, and only escalating the important stuf to the exec's attention.

Adrian Newey (cto of Red Bull Racing F1 team) famously has his emails printed off and then he replies in writing. His assistant types it out the following morning.

Seems like a very simple email filter would do the job, for internal emails at least

ceo's at this level have teams of executive assistants that cover all communications 24x7x365, for personal, work, and government liason. You don't think they actually read their own emails do you?

A former CEO of mine was known for keeping all his emails, forever. For this he needed special email storage arrangements from the IT team, including a laptop with a super-large HD.

If you ever turned up to a meeting and contradicted something you once said in an email, he'd be on to you in an instant.

I would filter emails by domain before they hit the exec's inbox.

Maybe aggressive filtering based on contacts or domain?

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