Many of us suffer from email overload: we receive much, too much, email. In the beginning email was a great innovation, enabling us to easily and quickly communicate with many people. That's still true, but coping with the volume of email has become a major problem, often consuming hours of what would have been productive time.

I have four goals for my email system. 1. Keep junk messages out of my inbox and quickly delete those that get in. 2. Attend to important messages promptly. 3. Keep most email messages for subsequent reference. 4. Keep the system of handling email as simple and as automatic as possible.

Several people have written some excellent articles or series of articles on the email overload problem, particularly Sam Grobart in the New York Times, 5 easy steps to stanch the email flood, tinyurl.com/85rhmur, Merlin Mann at his 43folders.com site, tinyurl.com/5ab4pp, Gina Tripani in fastcompany.com, Conquering Your EMail Inbox, tinyurl.com/ccxazco, and especially Bill Hoberecht's Information Overload 3 - Taming an Overflowing Inbox, tinyurl.com/7bcxe84. Given the seriousness of the problem, it's not surprising that if you google "too much email", you'll see thousands of citations, most dealing with receiver problems, but a surprising number dealing with sender issues.

The approaches vary from highly structured approaches based upon David Allen's "Getting Things Done" (GTD) methodology to Grobart's simplified system, "Letting Things Go" (LTG).

My methodology, if you can call it that, is definitely on the simplified side and has 3 legs - continual addition of spam or unwanted messages to a blacklist, filters to move messages to folders, and a Smart Mailbox to consolidate the display of unread messages. My system is called BMW ("Bazrod's Mail Wizard").

One explanatory detour is necessary. I'm in a halfway house, moving from a world of categorizing files or messages into hundreds of folders to a world of keywords, tags and context searches. I believe that until the Googles of the world refine or reinvent searching so we get mostly relevant material and not thousands or millions of possibilities, I'm still going to primarily rely on folders. You have read this theme in several prior columns, but I thought I'd prepare you. End of detour.

1. Stop Clearly Unwanted Mail.

This step has had the biggest payoff, although in the beginning it was a bit of a pain. I've been using it for about a month, it's no longer a pain, it's a habit and it has paid large dividends. The step is the use of a blacklist. I use 1&1's IMAP as a mail server which transmits email into Apple's Mail application on my iMac. It has a blacklist, a list of email addresses from which one doesn't want to receive messages. Such messages are marked as spam, are put into a spam folder, don't go into my inbox, and are automatically deleted after a set period. If I see an address from which I don't want to receive mail, I copy that address into a Pages file, which is always open, and then at least every other day, copy the new items into my blacklist on 1&1's website. I estimate that approximately half of my incoming email ends up in the spam folder.

The "From:" field of the dis played email address is a descriptor of the sender, such as the Mac Observer Express, CHS Alumni, Seeking Alpha, MacBus or the name of the sender. I have no idea of how it is done, but spam email often has the same display name with different email addresses. An example is Fraud Monitoring [creditscores@...]. Other beginning display names are Credit Card Approval, State Farm, BestBuyCard, Who's Who, LanguageLearning, Pimsleur Approach, Cut Mortgage Payments, Term Life Insurance, 100 Day Loans, and All Day Slim. Most of the time the email address does not appear to have any relationship to the display name. For example, "Fraud Monitoring creditscores@marimorganshop.com" I haven't looked into how this is done. I don't know whether the address is an address of the spammer, an address which has been captured by the spammer, or a phony address. What I am interested in is that I don't want to get emails from this source.

I get the impression that spammers set up a campaign for a particular name and then I receive perhaps a dozen similar messages over the course of 2 or 3 weeks. I put every one of these into the blacklist. Sometimes the campaign occurs over several months and sometimes the name varies slightly. All go into the blacklist. Yes, it does take a little bit of time, but it is not a lot. Yes, I expect that I will keep adding to the blacklist forever - or until the mail servers' spam filters eliminate all spam.

When I send the address to 1&1, I take out the display name and the< and > at the beginning and end. My guess is you'd do the same thing with other services.

I also use the Unsubscribe application. This is a free app available at unsubscribe.com which can run on your Mac. It unsubscribes you from the senders list by sending a message to the sender without you having to go through often complex steps indicated at the bottom of the email message. I only use Unsubscribe when I think that the sender is clearly a legitimate organization. I don't want to unsubscribe from a spammer's list because then I've told the spammer that my email address is a legitimate, live email address. He can continue to send me spam messages and probably also sell my address to other spammers. So if there's any doubt, I just copy the address to my blacklist.

2. Use Filters Extensively.

I retain most of my emails and I keep them in folders, many, many folders. As a result, messages in my inbox have to be transferred to a folder. Filters in Apple's Mail app are called Rules and are one of the headings in Mail Preferences. When I see the message from an address which I anticipate will continue to send messages and I want them to go into a folder, I open Rules and set up a rule which will move a message from that sender into the designated folder. All future messages from that sender will automatically go into that folder. Most of the time the rule is based upon the name of the sender. In rare cases, it's based upon the subject or the content.

There is sometimes a problem in the order in which filters should be applied. For example, Jack may send me messages directly and he may also send messages to a list serve which I receive. The list serve messages go into a folder, but I don't want Jack's direct message to go into the list serve folder. Therefore, I put in the beginning of the filters a rule that if the from is from Jack AND the "To:" field is the list serve, the message goes into the list serve folder. If both conditions are not satisfied, the message goes into the inbox. It's a bit complicated but you will quickly learn how to do it.

3. Set up an Unread Mail Smart Mailbox.

If you merely set up rules to move email messages into folders, you will have eliminated much of the moving of messages into folders, but your unread messages will be scattered among many folders and you will have to remember to go to all the folders where there are unread messages. That has a great potential for failure.

The solution is to set up a Smart Mailbox to include all messages which are unread, although the messages remain in the mailbox to to which they were moved. The Smart Mailbox is a saved query which is activated whenever you select it. When the message is read, it disappears from the Smart Mailbox, but remains in its original mailbox with the Unread indicator turned off.

Some Additional Steps.

You now have the 3 broad concepts for managing your email. What follows are a number of specific steps which should provide you with additional assistance.

A. Turn Alerts Off. You should not interrupt what you're doing to read, let alone respond to, the latest email. You set your own priorities. Thus, no need to have an alert when an email comes in.

B. Check Email Only Periodically, Not Continually. How often? It depends upon your personality. The suggestions are all over the board. I suggest 3 to 6 times a day or every hour or 2.

C. Don't Check Email First Thing In The Morning. Otherwise, you may be effectively giving the best part of your day to processing email. Much better to give attention to your high priority actions and then check your email after you make progress on the most important tasks. That advice makes sense, but I scan my email first thing in the morning to see if there's anything that should fit into my list of priorities and then I tend to the priorities. Most of time.

D. Unsubscribe From Some Mailing Lists. Are there some newsletters or mailing lists which you receive but never read? If so, unsubscribe. Are there some which you rarely read? Perhaps it's time to decide whether you want to continue receiving them.

E. Set Mailing List To Digests Mode. If you are not a person who quickly responds to mailing list messages, change your receipt to digest mode so you only receive one email a day from the list. This step will reduce the number of emails, the amount depending upon the frequency of the email messages.

F. Use Templates for Responses. f you are repeatedly sending or responding with 5 to 10 basic messages, think about automating the process. You could save each of the messages as a draft reply in your email program and copy the content to a new message. I have eight drafts of replies in Mail. Secondly, you can use a program that will let you use templates for your mail app. Some email programs have built-in templates. Thirdly, you could use TextExpander or other apps to save entire messages or parts of messages which would be triggered by a keyboard shortcut. Whatever you use, you'll save time.

G. Not All Email Messages Are Created Equal. As Merlin Mann says,

"In fact, understanding that a handful of messages in any given day are far more important and timely than all of the others combined is perhaps the most important place to start if you ever want to see your inbox fit onto one screen again.

Second, there is no way you will ever be able to respond to — let alone read in exquisite detail — every email you ever receive for the rest of your life."

So— don't feel guilty about not responding to a message. Some messages don't require a response and some don't merit one. The difficult question is when to say "thank you". Do you say thank you if someone send you two lines of information? What about two pages? What if it's unimportant? What if it's important? How do you decide? My answer is "It depends".

H. Delete What You Will Not Need. Do what you would do with physical mail. If you're a big saver of physical mail, you'll probably be a big saver of email; if you're not, you probably won't. Regardless, get the messages out of your inbox. Otherwise you will have implicitly designated your inbox as a messy todo list with kinds of unsorted messages. That's a bad idea.

I. Apply GTD's Two-Minute Rule. If you can deal with it in less than two minutes, deal with it! Admirable in theory, but other priorities may make this rule difficult to follow.

J. Use An Action-Reminder System. You need some method to keep actionable emails in one place. Some people use an Action folder for all emails for which they need to do something. I simply flag the email and have a Smart Mailbox which contains all the flagged email. This is a very personal subject and depends upon your workflow. It's also not a very easy system to design.

Your Backlogged Messages.

What can you do about the messages you haven't read or responded to that are still sitting in your inbox?

Gina Tripani suggests that you select all the email in your inbox that's more than 3 days old and move it into a Backlog folder, tinyurl.com/ccxazco. Process the remaining messages based upon your new system and every day process part of the messages in your Backlog folder.

Merlin Mann is more ruthless. Tinyurl.com/2sncx2. He suggests creating four Smart Mailboxes, one for messages received in the last 2 days, in the last 5 days, between 5 and 60 days, and, lastly, greater than 60 days. His process for dealing with emails in the last folder is simple - and draconian. Just delete them. That's how you stay sane. His last tip for processing the backlog is:

When you're ready to start processing your months and months of email, write this on an index card in big block letters, and put it on the wall behind your screen at eye level: Think in shovels, not in teaspoons.

You'll never stay ahead of this stuff if you don't recalibrate starting today. Give each message as much attention as it needs and not one iota more. Remember the contextuality of triage: if you keep trying to care for dead and doomed patients, you'll end up losing a lot of the ones who could have actually used your help.

Since reading Merlin Mann's use of four Smart Mailbox based upon how long the email has not been processed, I'm subdividing my Smart Mailbox. My date cutoffs are 3 days, 4 to 10 days, and more than 10 days.

Conclusion: The steps indicated above allow me to meet my goals for my email system, enabling me to do my work and live my life without email being the focus of everything. I wish you luck in handling your emails.

— Mark S. Bazrod, Newsletter Editor