Mastering Email Management: Tips for keeping on top of your emails, Clearing Down, Organizing Folders

Effective Email management is paramount for businesses of all sizes.

Email overload is a common challenge, with often hundreds of emails coming in every day, it can be a struggle to keep on top of the emails and to keep the inbox streamlined and focused.

Regularly clearing down your inbox involves decluttering unnecessary emails, archiving essential ones, and deleting those no longer relevant.

Here are some great tips on how to efficiently manage your email, utilizing rules, folders and archiving to keep your inbox organized and clutter-free.

Utilizing Folders for Organization:

Folders are a must for email management, due to the vast quantity of daily emails it cannot be good practice to keep every single one of your important emails inside the inbox alone.

It would be advised to create a logical folder structure to categorize emails based on projects, clients, or specific topics. This not only keeps your inbox tidy but also facilitates easy retrieval of information when needed.

Folders are a brilliant way to keep the email focused and organized, and are necessary for other email management options, namely automatic email filtering rules.

Implementing Email Rules:

Email management rules are powerful tools that can be setup and used to automate the organization of incoming messages. By setting up personalized email rules that automatically categorize, flag, or move emails based on predefined criteria you can automate the organization of your most frequent and expected emails, saving you time and allowing you to focus on critical tasks rather than sifting manually through emails throughout the week.

This really helps people who have a busy working day and will ensure that when you come in on Monday after a nice weekend away, you won’t have to worry about moving all the weekends emails into the right locations! You can simply check through the important emails that have arrived while you were away, in their relevant folders, and not worry about missing any or struggling to find them!

A quick way to set up email management rules via outlook is to right click on a mail in your inbox, and scroll the mouse down to the “rules” option, from there you can specify to move any emails sent by a specific sender into a folder of your choosing, this is brilliant if you always receive notifications from a certain email address that you want to be visible easily in a certain folder. 

Prioritizing Important Emails:

Prioritizing important emails by using flags, stars, or other visual indicators does require some management and physical intervention, but in return it allows you to quickly identify and address crucial messages, ensuring that nothing important gets missed.

Flagging emails creates a “to do” list which can be referenced to and is useful to remind you of tasks that are yet to be completed.

Emails can also be colour categorized based on custom criteria, a good use of email colours categorization would be to have a different colour for emails that have been checked and actioned, not actioned at all or emails that have been fully completed.

Email Archiving:

Archiving in some cases is essential and required for preserving important emails without having them taking up space in your primary inbox.

As part of the Microsoft 365 business standard licenses First Base provides, we are able to configure an archive mailbox of up to 50gb in size, this means that we can take up to 50gb of storage away from your primary inbox!

Archiving can be setup based on the retention time period by which you would like to keep emails in your main inbox. Say for example you need to have access to the last 6 months of email correspondence immediately at any given notice, then First Base would be able to setup archiving by criteria which would retain only the last 6 months of active emails into your primary mailbox and send anything older than 6 months into the online archive mailbox.

The best thing about archiving is that the emails are still available to be searched and accessed if and when required, but they won’t be slowing down your email profile, and it can really help to speed up your email search queries.

Unsubscribe:

Here’s a great one that’s often overlooked, if you once singed up for a mailing list but you no longer have any interest in the product or services that you are receiving emails about, do you still need to receive those emails? If not, it’s time to unsubscribe!

Legally all marketing emails should now have the option to opt out via marketing preferences, or unsubscribe completely, this means that with the click of the button (or a few depending on how many options you subscribed to initially) you can never receive emails of that nature from that specific sender again!

The unsubscribe / manage preferences button will almost always be a hyperlink at the bottom of the email you received, give it a click and fill out the options to stop receiving mail, trust me, you won’t regret it!

If you are still struggling with maintaining your inbox size please get in touch below, we have lots of experience across many different clients with various needs and retainment requirements, we’ll be able to assist you and recommend the best email management solutions specifically tailored to your own requirements.

see below for a tutorial on how to setup folders and a basic email management filtering rule on outlook for mac OS.