Manage Email with Signatures
There’s spam, and then there’s not-quite-spam. We all get the ads
offering to enlarge or reduce anatomical parts, increase our wealth, attract
members of the opposite sex, etc. These are frequently filtered out by
popular spam-killing software.
But what about the jokes from your brother-in-law, notices to your entire
group or solicitations from acquaintances for plastic food-preserver
parties? These emails are addressed directly to us, they don’t get
filtered by spam-killers and some kind of acknowledgement is actually
expected.
Create custom signatures for your email in addition to your normal
signature to handle these. Your normal signature in Outlook will have your
name, address and other contact information. This is probably appended to
all of your email automatically. But you can add another ‘signature’
that is a custom reply to a certain type of message:
Dear Joke Sender,
You’re killing me. Seriously. You’re killing me. Please take me off the
joke list.
Dear Plastic Food-Preserver
Party Thrower,
Sounds great, but I just can’t make it that night.
You may think that they sound forced and stale, but that may very well be
the point. One of the best ways to manage email is to get less of it. After
the third or fourth receipt of the exact same email, the sender may get the
hint!
To create a new signature, open Outlook but don’t create a new message.
Just go to Tools > Options and choose the Mail Format tab.
At the bottom,
you’ll see a button with the word Signatures… Click on the button and
then click New… from the next dialog box. Create a name for the ‘signature’
like JokeResponse or DeclineInvite. Start with a blank response and type in
your text.
Now whenever you are in an email you can go to Insert>Signature and
choose the appropriate response. Of course, you can modify your template
response as necessary. If you use Word as your email editor, you’ll have
to look a little harder for Signature Insert: it’s under the Options
button.
Best of luck handing the not-quite-spam!