Chapter 6: Email Management

What We’ll Cover >>>

• Email Concepts
• Email Account/Interface
• Organizing Emails
• Cleaning Accumulated Email
• Limiting Outgoing Emails
• Limiting Incoming Emails
• Email Crafting

If you have a lot of your emails in your inbox, and looming over your head, then this chapter is for you. While this textbook covers technical aspects of email in other chapters, this chapter can help organize your email life with some basic tips and tricks.

Email Concepts

Email is electronic mail, the mode of communication that uses electronic devices and data transmission to deliver messages between different computers.

When you send an email to contacts, there is a series of processes that happens in the background from when you send the email until the email is delivered to the recipient’s Inbox:

• Create then send the email.
• The email client (such as Gmail) connects to an outgoing email Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server.
• The email is handed over in a MIME (internet-standard encoded file) format, and the outgoing server validates sender details before processing the message.
• The mail goes into the SMTP server’s Outgoing queue.
• The SMTP server looks up then connects with the Recipient email server mail transfer agent (MTA) and sends the email.
• The Recipient server initiates various security checks then accepts the email if it passes.
• The Recipient server validates the recipient account and delivers the email to the user’s mail account, based on the incoming email policies set for the account.

This can happen almost instantaneously, or over several minutes, or over a couple of hours – depending on Internet connection, the rules and processes of the responsible servers, etc. Think how fast a website/service asking you to check your email to authenticate your login can be!

Email account/interface

Email interfaces, like Outlook and Gmail, have fairly standard default aspects to preparing, sending, organizing, and saving emails. These include:

• Contact list: An email account contact list lets you add past and current recipients, and new names/email addresses, so that you can use it to find and send emails to specific people as needed.
• Filters/rules: You can set filters and email response rules to help automate your email processing. For instance, if you net a weekly email newsletter you like but read only once every few weeks, you can set a filter rule to automatically remove it from your inbox, store it in another folder, and leave it in unread status.
• Folders/labels: Organizing emails category tool for sorting emails by removing them from the active inbox and storing them in folders where you can find them later.
• Forwarding: You can forward a message you created or received to another person.
• Message: Email text area workspace for drafting email text.
• Inbox: Active emails needing a response / action come here first.
• Priorities/sensitivity: You can assign a level or important/priority to an outgoing email to alert the receiver to handle it quickly. Same with sensitivity, but regarding how to handle with confidentiality.
• Reply: You can send your response to an email after choosing to “reply.” Reply All refers to replying to everyone who received the email you received, and should be used extremely rarely or not at all. Why? Reply all emails can become long and confusing responses by multiple people, clog up inboxes with unneeded information, and impact the confidentiality that one or more recipients may expect.
• Styling: You can style the font size, family, and color, as well as text background colors and email footer formats, using a basic text style toolbar.
• Subject line: Tells the receiver what the message is about.
• To field: Where the email recipient name(s) will go for addressing the email. Emails can be sent to one or more people in the main To field. A related CC field can also accept one or more email contacts, and carbon copy (CC) is meant to indicate “informational” as a priority. The BCC field is a second related field referring to “blind carbon copy), which hides the names/recipients of an email from the other recipients who receive the email. Note: The BCC field is especially useful in keeping email recipients’ names/emails private from each other when an email is sent to several people.

MedAttrib: author-generated. Example Email user interface.

There are usually additional email options available, depending on the service. These can include email views, spell-checking, creating default email footers, multi-step email filters, showing ‘read email’ status, automatic email tasks, etc. You will want to examine your own email account for options and how you personally want to prioritize using them.

Organizing Emails

These are some general tips and techniques for organizing and managing your email process and content. An instructor who is focusing on an email assignment will likely give you specific steps to accomplish in a more formal assignment, but this section can help the routine email user.

Your goal should be to keep your email ‘lean and clean’ – in reference to having a quickly emptied Inbox, easily organized email message storage files, and the ability to find and handle emails as needed. Inbox Zero is a ‘thing’ – a practice to look at and get all emails out of your active inbox so that you keep up with communications and can focus on incoming emails without clutter. People can get tens to hundreds of emails a day, and an ignored or messy inbox may look dramatic and like lots of work is happening, but it can also cause a lot of important stuff to be overlooked and ignored. However, not dealing with and sorting out in-box emails is actually unprofessional and work can/does get missed, people get delayed, etc. In school and in the workplace, part of your job is to be accessible and responsive, and to do your part to communicate and complete work product on time with minimal confusion with and for others.

Email account tips

• For your own use, create/use a main email account for important personal business like your bills, online shopping, school-related items, and job-related emails that are not part of your actual employment workplace emails.
• Create a secondary email address for ‘disposable’ and marketing-related emails so they don’t get in the way of your main email account’s email messaging. You may sign up for a newsletter, or discounts, or at a gaming company’s website; keep all that separate from your primary email address, especially if they start spamming you.
• Choose a basic and professional-sounding email address, especially for anything routinely serious. Using something like KissTheStudent1234@gmail.com does not inspire confidence, especially when looking for jobs or handling serious personal business.
• Develop an email password protocol that you will remember, that uses strong passwords, and that you can update regularly.
• Don’t download or open attachments, website addresses, or ads in your email unless you really really want viruses and ad/malware.

Email handling

• Handle incoming emails a couple of times a day and act on them / get them out of your inbox right away so you know what is new and needs a response.
• Create several email sorting folders/labels for handling priorities, like Hot, Reference, ReadMe, Meetings, Pending, etc. Email folders/labels can also have sublabels, like Products > Orders, Books, Computer.
• Once a quarter, clean folders to get rid of or archive past-current emails from, say, at least a year earlier. Get emails out of your face and unneeded ones out of email storage.
  • That being noted, keep any email receipts and notices about ordering / product problems for longer, in case you need to solve a problem. Same for school-related emails and emails about any conflicts, with any needed login information, etc. Just organize them out of your inbox and active working folders.
• Use your own outgoing email signature footer to give information. For instance, a signature usually gives your name, contact information, and maybe company name and job title. You can also add a useful line of text as needed. In my own case as an instructor, I always add something like the following to my outgoing email signatures: “Students: Our next due date is Friday, March 24, before 11:59pm. Please review the current Section’s Overview/Resources pages, the FAQs, and announcements if needed.”

Clean Accumulated Email

• Do a fast sort of your emails from top to bottom which can make sure the most recent are at the top.
• Review emails you received from NOT People: These might include newsletters, ads, spam, mail listservs, etc. Consider deleting all you can since you likely don’t need these, then sort the rest into other folders.
• Review emails to NOT you: These can include forwarded emails for your info, CC’d emails so you have a copy, listserv emails to a group, and emails to a mailing list with other people besides you. Consider deleting all you can since you likely don’t need these, then sort the rest that has resource/reference information into folders.
• Review the remaining unread email: Look for anything that really seems urgent, like emails with an action-needed Subject line, priority, sensitivity, and read-receipt attached to it to get your attention. Sort/delete the rest as needed, and take care of the rest of the business.0
• Act upon emails to YOU from a real person: These are the priority emails you should want to get to and handle quickly. They could include specific-to-you homework issues, work benefits deadlines, work product/process follow-up, a calendar request for a task or online meeting, etc.

Limit Outgoing Emails

• DO send one email at a time when there is a specific need: Different subjects may actually need different decisions, and in this case, don’t lump 3 or 4 separate topics for discussion and decisions in a single email. The recipient may also be sorting emails for reference and later needs.
• Don’t send many low-priority emails when one will do: Use your drafts or a notes app to keep track of things that you want to send people that are not urgent or don’t belong to a specific project. Once you hit three things (like a couple of newsletter links and a quick question), then send the email with three things instead of sending three separate emails.
• Don’t choose Reply-All: Don’t start an email chain where everyone has to respond to the whole group and people end up being spammed when they don’t need/want to be. The fewer people on an email, the fewer responses you’ll get back. Consider using reply-all only if more than one person needs to know the email was responded to, if your response will influence others, and/or if the email impacts maybe 4 out of 5 people on the chain, AND let the recipients know if it is an info-only email or who needs to take action.
• Give yourself time to back out: If an email may be a little challenging, or you might not have quite enough information, you might hold the email in your outbox for a couple of minutes, or even overnight, to think about it. Better to be kind, gracious, accurate, and professional than to be fast and inarticulate.
• Send fewer emails: If you send out fewer emails, you will receive fewer. Always ask yourself if an email needs to be sent out or if it can wait until later. Is it specific to a school or work product, or a confidential matter between you and one other person (like in Human Resources), or a necessary communication about something you need to get handled and have a “paper trail” on? Or, is it something the other person has to weed out?
• Use Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) more: BCC is a way to keep people in the loop even when they are not the primary person an email is intended for. BCC on emails prevents other people from using to hit “reply-all” to spam the whole group. The Bcc’d recipient will know the email is sent without being subjected to all the chatter that happens afterward. It is also good if you want to include someone who may be affected by the email planning but hasn’t been included, like a supervisor, or another colleague who may be interested but not yet involved.
• Use email positively: Avoid email as a way of breaking bad news to someone, if you are upset, or if you are resolving a conflict. These things need face-to-face / a phone call / online conferencing so a discussion can happen, body language and voice inflections can be added, etc.

Limit Incoming Emails

• Mark It as Junk: If you can’t unsubscribe from something, consider marking it as junk. It will go to your junk mail folder so if you really need it in the next 30 days, it will be there, but it will also not be in your inbox and it will automatically disappear.
• Move it to something else: Do you have a blog you follow that you get emails about? Instead of getting an email for it, sign up for an RSS service or just set a time on your calendar to go read the blog. If you are getting notifications from a service, just schedule a time to check that service instead of getting notifications. This goes for Twitter, Facebook, Slack, etc.
• Turn off notifications: People often use emails as a notification system. The purpose of a notification is to get your attention. If your inbox is full, then any notification there will not get your attention, so it doesn’t help.
• Unsubscribe: Unsubscribe from anything you can manage. Before you make a rule or a workflow in how to handle something, decide if you really need it or not. An easy way to determine if you need something is by looking at how many of the emails from that subscription are unread.
• Use rules: If you can create in-box rules, do so. You can sort emails by subject, by sender, by colorized category, and by keyword into other email folders so that you you have them but don’t need to read them immediately. You can even use rules to leave emails unread (important stuff to YOU) or mark them as read (listservs, newsletters, training offers).

Email Crafting

BE the organized person that you want to get emails from. Help others get your message and act on it fast so you don’t have to wait around.

• Always identify the purpose and action needed in your email Subject. Examples:
  • ACTION: BUS108 Assignment question for Ch6Activity2
  • RESOURCE: URLs to Twitch Streamers you requested
  • QUESTION: Absent tomorrow, need timesheet now?
  • NOTE: Not available for this week’s Fiscal Subcommittee meeting.
  • REFERENCE: Steps for new “ghost students” drop process.
• Don’t use a bunch of abbreviations, acronyms, misspellings, slang, or treat the email like a dashed-off text message to your best friend. Especially in an email Subject line. Your instructor, supervisor, or service provider (tech help, shopping vendor, billing agent) don’t want – or have time – to interpret inarticulate info. They will just delete something like (and be irritated by):
  • Hey OG. HI WUU2? OK TLDR. FYI TBH IDK what PFA means rofl. 2day total not slay. IAM. Do U C what needs to happen EOD? gr8! LMK. NNTR & TTYL.
• Use a simple and consistent email content structure that immediately tells your reader who, what, where, why, how and when. Assume your email receiver will not know everything you know and give them the info the first time. (Example below). No one has time for little bits of information dribbled over 4-5 emails – especially your instructors.
• Provide specific information, and a visual (or audio if appropriate) example, like a screenshot of the error message, or of the item giving you trouble.
• End your email with a call to action and a timeline.
• A “thank you for your time” or other kindness in closing makes a social and kind difference.
• Check your spelling.
• Add priority, or sensitivity, or a read receipt only if really needed. If every email from you is a rush, none of them will actually be treated as a rush.

EXAMPLE EMAIL

Subject line: ACTION: BUS108 Assignment question for Ch6Activity2

Hello. I have a question on Ch6Activity2 for the MS Word section, which is due in two days. I have already read through the chapter, followed the instructions, and also looked at the demo video link you posted in the assignment summary.

However, I can’t get the color scheme to look like the assignment requires. I don’t get the blues and blue-greens in the MS Word color palette that the chapter refers to. I am working on a Mac, and the palette choices look different than in the video demo.

Here is a screenshot of what my assignment looks like now (embedded or attached). Can you help me understand why I don’t have the color choice and what I can do?

Thank you.

Result:

This covers who (the student), what (Assignment problem and what the student already tried and an example screenshot), where (Ch6Activity2), why (color palette isn’t giving correct options), how (question of how to fix) and when (due in 2 days). As the instructor, I would likely recognize that the student might not be using the specific color palette mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, which means they are accessing a default MS Office color scheme and not the BlueGreen palette the assignment actually asked for. Or, I might ask the student for a screenshot of the available Mac palettes so we can pick a close similarity. An easy fix, well before deadline!