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How to Manage Email

By Jeanne Feldkamp

Messages from your kids' schools. Automatic billing confirmations. Newsletters from your favorite web sites. Notes from your friends -- and from your kids' friends. Forwarded jokes. Oh, and lots and lots of spam.

Sound familiar? It isn't unusual for families to receive hundreds of emails each week -- and some households get that many in just one day. But the barrage of incoming emails doesn't have to overwhelm you. With a simple organization strategy and a little discipline, getting control of your inbox can be easy. Just follow these five steps.

Step 1: Use folders to divide and conquer
If each person in your family has a separate email address, but you all receive mail in the same inbox, start by setting up individual inboxes for each person. In Mail on a Mac, for example, go to File > Add Account and follow the prompts to set up new inbox folders for each email address. On a PC running Outlook Express, select Tools > Accounts, click the Add button and choose Mail. Once these folders are set up, incoming mail will be automatically sent to the right person's folder rather than dumped into a common inbox.

You can also set up shared folders for categories everyone in your family uses, like school messages and letters from Grandma. That way, everyone can file messages you all want to check out in the same place -- regardless of which email address they were sent to.

"You can set up a whole electronic filing system," says Margie Lehnen-Holtz, a professional organizer and owner of organization consulting firm Curb The Clutter. "One of my clients has two sons, and each of them gets a lot of email from their high school. So they have folders for school email. When the older son started to do college research, they set up a separate folder for that. You can create new folders as you go along."

Step 2: Create rules to automatically file certain emails
For some families, a good folder system might be all you need to keep your email organized -- as long as you have the discipline to file messages in the right folders as soon as you read them. But for most people, it's also helpful to set up a few automatic filing rules within your email program. These rules let certain messages (like e-newsletters, for example) bypass your inbox and go straight to a folder where you can read them when you have time.

To set up email filing rules on a Mac, go to Mail > Preferences, select the Rules tab and click Add Rule. In Outlook Express, go to the Tools menu and click on Message Rules > Mail. Now you can choose to have emails that come from your "Grandma" e-mail address, for example, filed in the Grandma folder you created earlier.

"The only potential problem with automatic filing rules is that you might not see new emails that come in if you're only looking in your inbox," Lehnen-Holtz says. "But some email programs will put the folder name in bold to show that there's new mail -- make sure you test your program before you decide whether to use such rules."

Step 3: Filter out the junk
Now that you have a system for sorting the emails you actually want to receive, what about the ones you don't want? According to Lehnen-Holtz, anti-spam software is a critical part of the battle to keep your inbox under control.

"Deleting junk mail by hand can get tedious," she says. "Anti-spam software works with your email program to automatically send suspicious messages to a spam folder, where it will be deleted after a period of time (usually a week)."

She says every few days, you should check the spam folder to make sure there aren't any legitimate emails in there. If that happens, click the Not Spam or Not Junk Mail button that appears on the email message. This way, email from that sender won't get canned in your spam folder next time.

Another good strategy: create a free web mail account and use that address when you fill out online forms. Since many spammers get addresses by buying lists from web sites, using a secondary email address can help protect your primary address from getting on those junk email lists in the first place.

Step 4: Clean out old emails regularly
Over time, your family's email can start to take up a lot of storage space on your computer -- and if you never delete emails, it might even slow down your computer's performance.

"If you need to save an email, file it," Lehnen-Holtz says. "If there isn't any information in the email that you'll need later -- delete it! I tell my clients to review their old emails about once a week. That way, things don't build up too much. And it won't take you more than a few minutes to go through your folders and throw out anything that isn't relevant anymore."

Step 5: Take certain conversations offline
Another way to cut down on email clutter is to use it only to exchange information that needs to be written down (like billing confirmations). Sure, email can be quicker than snail-mail letters for keeping in touch with friends or loved ones. But if you don't have time to write or read long emails, suggest a date to talk on the phone instead. And for emails you don't need online anymore but need for your files (like vacation booking receipts, for example), print them out and delete the email.

"It's a trade-off sometimes, paper clutter versus email clutter," Lehnen-Holtz says. "Just remember: If you have a good filing system and a way to filter out spam, getting control of your inbox can be easy."