Working for the BBC, I have never seen anything as mad as the email culture here. It’s easy to drown in email if you don’t constantly check it.

Yammer, the internal Twitter-a-like service, was alive yesterday with email hints and tips, after one person owned up to having the same problems that I do.

Here, suitably anonymised, is that conversation. It shows that Yammer is a great product, but also that there are some bright people here. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m off to clear some more of that email.

JF: Email is fantastically useful, but it’s also incredibly frustrating. Blink, and you’ve got another 30… This is a bit geeky, but what are your inbox management tips? Or do you just let it overflow and hope that you can remember what needs to be done? I could go on for ages about a system that works for me, but would welcome other people’s thoughts too.

AG in reply to JF: I’d say common sense… I receive around 1000 emails a month (<1% spam), and send around 400.
1) use rules for organising useful stuff, keeping dlists and subscriptions separate.
2) For anything not obeying a rule, archive every month
3) delete anything over 3 months old not obeying a rule
4) Use 'read or unread' status as an aide memoire
5) Subscribe to newsletters, but unsubscribe from them if they are not useful
6) set aside 10 mins a day to trawl through stuff you may have missed.

RM in reply to AG: Some great tips there – I find liberal use of the delete button helps.

AG in reply to RM: I think people forgot that ‘post’ is basically the same as email (albeit slower) so it’s safe to assume that the same rules should apply to both methods of communication / advertising / scams, etc

HB in reply to JF: Echoing AG a lot here. Set up rules so that irrelevant things (automated notifications, invitations to certain meetings) get binned. Check my deleted folder every couple of days. D-lists are routed to separate folders, as are emails pertaining to my various projects (I set up a notification sound and desktop popup for some of these so I don’t miss them). I use mark-as-read and unread, and also variously coloured flags (red for “do this”, orange for “partway done”, blue for “info to keep”, etc), to sort stuff. And my inbox is still groaning with 5900 total items!

DH in reply to RM: I find the opposite – I delete nothing. That way I have a complete archive of all the e-mails I’ve ever received and can search for things if I need them again. I also spend zero minutes per day managing my inbox.

HB in reply to DH: I’ve wondered about this technique. Doesn’t IT complain? I know I get nag mails and my profile starts bugging out when I have too much stuff in my inbox…

DH in reply to HB: IT used to complain but I treated it as spam ;)

JE in reply to DH: I’m with DH on this. IT might hate me, but I have 2 .pst files in which I archive everything (except spam). I’ve got 2 because the first one got bigger than 4GB and the FAT32 file system couldn’t handle it…

AG in reply to HB: Another benefit of keeping your main inbox clean… Outlook remains speedy, as does webmail.
7) Use the ‘Folder sizes’ link to find how big your inbox is, and clean / reduce the size accordingly. Sort by email size to quickly find the worst offenders – making sure you save any files to your D drive, and not your F drive.

HB in reply to AG: I forgot to mention a very important time-saving scheme of mine – colour. See Tools>Organize in Outlook. I colour all emails sent directly to me in purple. Emails sent to my immediate team are coloured dark blue. Emails FROM me are coloured aqua (to make them deliberately less visible) and everything else is left black. This way, I can prioritise stuff sent directly to me, followed by stuff sent directly to my team. You may have to set it up multiple times for different folders though. >:( (Also, my inbox now stands at 3,264 after some therapeutic mass email murder.)

AW in reply to HB: My inbox is only at 383. I must be very unpopular. Or very good at deleting stuff that is now irrelevant. Or very good at filing.

HB in reply to AW: A little of columns B and C, I’ll wager. (I still have a “welcome to the beeb” email from Greg Dyke dated Dec 03.)

Thanks to my colleagues for their bright ideas. 543 items right now, by the way – 182 unread.

Photo by Flickr user Juliette. Used under licence. Thanks!

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