Legal Marketing & PR

Chopping Through Your Email Inbox

By Larry Bodine

Who isn't sick to death about the overload of email? The helpful folks at the ABA's Law Practice Today offer some tips:

Two Folders Everyone Should Have: Outlook tools such as Rules and Alerts and add-ons may help you manage your inbox, but they need to be coupled with the right folders in order to be truly effective. These two folders can bring you a long way in helping you sort automatically a great amount of your emails:

1. "Non-urgent': Where non urgent communications such as general announcements inside your organization or newsletters should be automatically sorted in this folder by an Outlook rule.
2. 'Buffer': A buffer zone between your inbox and the trash, to keep your inbox clean from emails that you know you will eventually delete, but that you're scared of sending to trash too soon. This is where you would sort the conversation-like threads that don't need to be archived in the long term. This folder is especially useful when using these Outlook add-ons that can sort both outgoing and incoming mail when replying.

Rule To Delay Sent Mail By One Minute (in case you change your mind):

1. In Outlook, click on the Tools menu . Rules and Alerts . New Rule button.
2. Under "Start from a blank rule," choose "check messages after sending."
3. On the next screen ("which conditions do you want to check"), don't check anything (you want this rule to apply to every email you send) and click the Next button at the bottom. You'll see the following dialog (click Yes):
4. In the next screen, check "defer delivery by a number of minutes," and then click the hyperlink for "a number of" at the bottom of the screen and enter the number of minutes you want to delay your email.
5. Click Next and add any exceptions (for people you don't want to delay email to).
6. Click Next, name your rule Delay and click Finish.

Rule To Keep Track of Delegated Email: Many people forward email to others to deal with but have a difficult time remembering what they delegated for follow up purposes. Here's a rule that will help.

1. First, create a folder in Outlook called Delegated Email.
2. In Outlook, click on the Tools menu . Rules and Alerts . New Rule button
3. Under "start from a blank rule," choose "check messages when they arrive" and click Next at the bottom of the dialog.
4. Under "check which conditions do you want to check," check BOTH "from people or distribution list" and "where my name is in the CC box." At the bottom of the dialog, click the hyperlink for "people or distribution list" and add your email address. We're basically creating a rule that will look for emails from you and copied to you. Click Next.
5. Under "what do you want to do with the message," choose "move it to the specified folder." Make the specified folder your Delegated Mail folder. Click Next and add any exceptions. Click Next, name it and click Finish.

To read and download the rest of this article, visit the Best of ABA TECHSHOW Archives at www.techshow.com/bestofabatechshow .

Full post as published by Larry Bodine's LawMarketing Blog on June 21, 2010 (boomark / email).