Managing Your Email In Outlook
Spam is here to stay! Where does it all come from!?
1) From outside your organization
A variety of consumer research organizations report superior results using
email versus other directing marketing methods. Email is virtually free and
highly customizable. Dozens, if not hundreds, of companies have sprung up
offering email lists (via email… sigh…) to organizations wishing to
implement email campaigns.
2) From inside your organization
We all want to announce promotions, new hires, and other good news to the
whole department or the whole company. Human resources is required to send out
job offerings, class offerings and other employee-specific information to all
employees. Even the IT department is guilty of filling up our email boxes with
system-down, system-back-up, system-will-be-down-tonight messages.
The first thing to do is get off any list you can. The Direct Marketing
Association maintains a list of consumers who wish to be taken off email, phone,
and direct mail lists. You can write to them for free or pay $5.00 on the web to
be taken off direct marketing lists. Visit them
at
http://www.dmaconsumers.org/consumerassistance.html
to see how it works.
Getting off lists at work is probably more problematic. You could go tell
your boss to stop sending you so much damn email but I Get It! Development does
not endorse this approach. You’ll have to
get your email program to help you out. If you use Outlook, take a tour through
the Rules Wizard. Go to your Inbox, click on Tools, then on Rules Wizard… If
you haven’t used it before, you’ll only have one option available—New…
There are some ‘canned’ rules like “Move messages based on content.”
They are usually self-explanatory and the wizard walks you through each step.
This one, for instance, looks for specific words or phrases like “Comdex” or
“trade show” and then moves the message to a specifically created folder
like Comdex 2002 or Tradeshows 2002.
You can create your own rules by clicking on the first choice under New…
which is “Check messages when they arrive.” Choose this type and click Next
>. In the next window you see a wide variety of conditions. Let’s start
with a simple one. Choose “Where my name is not in the To box.” This will
apply to all messages sent to lists and messages which you have only been CC’ed
or BCC’ed on. What would like to do with these? Click Next. Choose Delete It.
All right! Now all those pesky “To All Employee” messages will never even
show up in the Inbox!
Hmmm. Neither will messages sent from my boss to my department. Oh yeah.
Click Next. We had better enter in the exceptions in this part of the Rules
Wizard—Exceptions. Choose “Except if sent from
People or Distribution
List. When it appears in the bottom window, click on the underlined phrase,
then select your boss, boss’ boss, spouse, etc. Their messages will not be
deleted. Give your rule a name and turn it on. Goodbye Spam. Try the other rules
for more options for forwarding, categorizing, flagging, prioritizing and moving
emails to various folders.