| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | How do you keep your head above water when you're drowning in emails? Thread poster: philgoddard
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| Canned responses and conversation view | Mar 9, 2016 |
Conversation view keeps all messages with the same subject line together, and cuts down on the number of incoming separate messages.
Canned responses help you answer faster by recycling your most commonly used messages, like accepting/refusing a job or sending an invoice or quote. Then you can adapt the wording as needed.
| | | | Michael Beijer 
United Kingdom
Local time: 22:33
Member (2009)
Dutch to English
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Rolf Keller wrote: philgoddard wrote:
I use Yahoo webmail, but I'm sure this issue applies to most providers, and I don't want to switch to a different company. Many (all?) providers offer web mail as well as "real" mail. Yahoo provides both, anyway . Why do you use web mail instead of a mail client application (MS Outlook, The Bat, ...)? Web mail targets grandmothers & grandfathers who ignore the 'P' in 'PC' but it doesn't target entrepreneurs. Web mail is ok, if you have no PC, no mobile phone etc. handy but only an Internet café.
There is nothing unreal about a paid Google Apps for Work Gmail account.
I have tried all the desktop solutions, and found them all sorely lacking. I don't have time to fiddle around with buggy Windows software. Keeping it all online is so much more efficient. Also, there is nothing those retro desktop clients can do I can't do in my Gmail account (except for lose your email if you're not careful).
Michael
PS: Actually, every grandmother I know uses Outlook
| | | | Elena Kharitonova
Russian Federation
Local time: 01:33
Member (2016)
German to Russian
+ ...
rules! I have just nstalled it, added my 2 existing mails (google and yandex) and created several local folders ("Work", "News", "Hobby") and I like it! Thank you for good advice!
| | | | Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 22:33
Member (2008)
Italian to English
Elena Kharitonova wrote:
rules! I have just nstalled it, added my 2 existing mails (google and yandex) and created several local folders ("Work", "News", "Hobby") and I like it! Thank you for good advice!
I like Thunderbird too - and customising it is fun. For me, it's a hot contender to replace Apple Mail but it doesn't play a choice of sounds depending on where you're filtering different emails. So for that reason I don't use it much. I bet there's an add-on somewhere that does play different sounds !
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Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 23:33
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
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philgoddard wrote:
I find it increasingly difficult to manage the sheer volume of incoming and outgoing emails. It can be hard to find specific messages - the search facility is slow, and fails to find messages that I know are there - and I often get distracted when one email comes in while I'm dealing with another.
I have a separate e-mail address for client-related mails. If a fellow-translator writes me an e-mail about something language related (e.g. a term query) but it is not for a client, then I forward his mail to my "private" mail account, and then deal with it from there. Similarly, if a client gets a hold of my private mail address somehow, and sends me a mail to it, then I forward that mail to my "business" e-mail account, and deal with it from there.
I use Gmail, by the way. I check the spam folder regularly (at least once a day) to see if any client mails landed there by mistake. After I've checked the spam folder, I delete all spam in it.
When a mail comes in while I'm busy with something else, I simply ignore it if I think I know what it says, but otherwise I quickly open it to see if it's more important than what I'm currently doing. If not, then I mark the mail as "unread" again. In other words, in my inbox, all mails that are marked as "read" are already dealt with, and all mails that are marked as "unread" still have to be dealt with.
Any mail that relates to something that I must still do (e.g. the hand-off mail for a job) is marked with a yellow star. When the the job is finished, I remove the yellow star. Sometimes a client sends mails with multiple subject lines, which Gmail considers different threads, but then I ensure that only one of those threads are marked with a yellow star.
Gmail has the functionality to mark mails with labels, manually or based on certain criteria (e.g. e-mail address or the presence of a keyword in the body of the mail), so I could in theory mark all mails from a certain client or for a certain job with a certain label, but I no longer do that.
Gmail's search function can't find anything smaller than a word. So if a job number is e.g. 123A456B, then I can't find that mail by searching for "456B" (unless the number is visible in the subject line in the list of mails). This can be very annoying.
Gmail considers any mail with the same subject line to be part of the same "thread" and only shows threads in the e-mail list view (not all individual mails are listed, in other words). Perhaps there is a setting in Yahoo that can do what Gmail does.
There are times, though, when I need to search more comprehensively than Gmail itself can do. So, I use Thunderbird, and set up an IMAP account that downloads all my Gmail. However, this only downloads the headers and not the full e-mails. So, I created a separate dummy e-mail account in Thunderbird, and I regularly (once a week) manually copy all mails from the IMAP folder into that e-mail account's folder. This forces Thunderbird to download the actual messages (not just the headers). Then I can use Thunderbird's search function.
Sometimes I fail to answer emails because they slip down the list so quickly.
Gmail's "threaded view" isn't real threaded view, but the fact that Gmail groups mails together by subject line helps keep the list shorter.
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