Module 2 - Email Tasks

Over the years I have used many different email clients and services. Recently though, I made a step towards going all digital and moved my my primary personal email to Google's Gmail service. Gmail offers lots of nice little touches and I love it. Just wanted to share that before I launched into the tasks :)


1. What information about a user's email, the origin of a message, and the path it took, can you glean from an email message?
You can get a lot of information from a seemingly simple email. To begin with there is the email address itself, is it a company or educational address or is it a free Hotmail account or similar. Next you can choose to display the email headers (it's where the technical stuff sits), from here you can get all sorts of information including delivery paths, formats etc. The only time I really do all this is if I am unsure of an email. As a rule of thumb, checking the from address and if there is a reply to address generally tells me all I need to know on a day to day basis.


2. In what cases would you find it useful to use the 'cc', 'bcc' and 'reply all functions of email?
The dreaded 'cc', oh how I hate to be the recipient of an email where I am 'cc' into the chain of communication. It's interesting to note that in the previous concept regarding "The mobility of electronic digital data" that the comment is made where as people begin to understand the mobility of data, they include more people than is necessary in their communication. Too many times I receive emails which have little or no relevance to me or someone has hit reply all when they should have just hit reply as there was no need for everyone to be included in their private conversation. For me those three functions should be used as such (and this is how I endeavour to use them):

• a) cc - As a courtesy where that person has been involved in previous discussions or there is a requirement for the recipient to be across the information.
• b) bcc - Used when email yourself a copy of a sent email or forwarding details to a third party to make second party aware. e.g. recieved an expression of interest to tour a DJ, as I was not the correct person for this I replied and advised the inital party I would forward their details on to the correct person who I had bcc'd into my response (I rarely use bcc).
• c) reply all - Only needed to be used if ALL recipients need to be across the rely to the original email. Use this sparingly.

3. In what ways can you ensure that an attachment you send will be easily opened by the receiver?
In a previous life as a publisher and designer for a Hobart based street press, I was continually on the receiving end of files and documents which required propriety software to open them (even if our spec sheets dictated exactly the required formats, grrrrrr). Often to meet deadlines, time was spent racing around searching out applications which could read these documents or at the very least extract the relevant data. At times it felt all we were going to be able to do was try and feel the data in side the document, hmmm, yes, drive me mad did it young Jedi.

Of course now things area lot better, there are still some compatibility issues, but mostly they are due to people just saving in the wrong format or using some obscure format which died out years ago (or should have). Nowadays I find the best way to ensure an attachment can be opened is to ask if the receiver has the required software to open the file you intend to send. Failing that I will send the file as a PDF document. For me PDF has become the default "accessible document format" and due to inbuilt functionality, free reader downloads and it's ability to retain formatting of a document it's much more appealing than sending a RTF document. And now with the advent of editable PDF files, this format is even more powerful than ever.


4. What sorts of filters or rules do you have set up, and for what purpose?
I love email filters, if an email application doesn't have filters then I don't want to know about it :) As I previously mentioned I use Gmail as my primary email and Gmail provides me with a pretty darn good filter/labeling system. I try to work on a bastardised version of David Allen's GTD theory of an empty inbox, as such I try to pretty much filter everything that comes in and label it in the process. This pretty much leaves my Gmail inbox empty or very close to empty.

Work wise I use Outlook and have a number of rules set up (I am the Outlook rule king at work). My primary rules are based around distribution lists, which once run, leave only emails directly addressed to me in my inbox. This of course allows me to focus on the things which most likely need my direct attention. I found this method while trawling the interwebs after I first learned about GTD. Trust me, coming from a company where sending emails is near a sport, this approach has saved my inbox and my sanity.


5. How have you organised the folder structure of your email and why?
My folder organisation is based on my filters. As Gmail's filters label email as they come in. I have everything pretty much catagorised and sorted as it hits my inbox. I can then either check all mail chronologically or each seperate category as I wish. This then leaves a failrly empty inbox where I can address those random occasional emails quickly and efficently.

On a work level. Again my folders are determined based on my rules, where each rule has it's own folder where mail is automatically filtered to. The difference is here that my inbox will retain all email directly addressed to me as this theoretically is mail which needs my immediate attention.

As you can see points 4 and 5 work hand in hand for me. Generally both these approaches allow me to keep on top of my inbox and manage my email effectively rather than email managing me. Geeky I know.

Edit: I have been searching for a week since I made this post, looking for the original site which introduced me to Dave Allen and GTD and in particular, the method that I manage my email. Now finally success: Jeff Sandquist is a Microsoft evangelist and it was his two excellent posts on managing email which put me on this path.


Thought for the day
It really is interesting revisiting things that you use on a day to day basis and looking at them in a different light. Looking at things reflectively always opens up new avenues of information or understanding so this process or re-looking at email is actually quite interesting and has allowed me to rethink one or two ways that I deal with email. Ultimately I think this will help me further refine my approach to handling and communicating via email.