Taking care of one of my regular Monday morning routines. Doing a quick scan of my email Junk Mail folders and trying to figure out if there’s anything in there important. A very rarely get false positives in my spam filters, but every now and then it does happen so I’ve got to scan quickly.

As I’m scanning I usually do a couple of things to make legitimate messages pop-out a little bit from the rest of the junk in the folders. I’ll sort by name first and quickly delete patterns of emails, then switch to sorting by subject and do …read more

I spent today at a productivity summit that talked about a variety of ways to increase productivity both personally and in your company as a whole. The first session discussed “Managing Email Productivity”. One of the methods shared was to reverse the composition of your email messages.
In the standard model we normally write emails in this order.

Input recipients
Write subject
Write body of message
Attach files

Robby Slaughter, the presenter of the summit shared his preferred method of reversing this process flow and the reasons behind each. I’m significantly paraphrasing but this is the basic premise.

Attach files – how many times have you sent …read more

I got an email last night that I’d been waiting to receive for quite awhile.  I received notice that my subscription to eWeek would be cancelled if I didn’t respond. We’ll see. I’ve actually been trying to unsubscribe from my subscription for quite some time. I click on all the unsubscribe and remove links I see in the various emails.
Hopefully they’ll do what they say they’re going to do and cancel my subscription. It’s not that it’s a bad email newsletter, just trying to adjust and prioritize what’s getting put into my Inbox on a regular basis.
What’s been your experiences …read more

It’s become one of the crucial components of the way business gets done for me on the computer. I use it to organize information and to communicate with clients, both by e-mail and by instant messaging and chat. It’s Gmail.
Recently while at a client where I could not get POP3 email to send or receive with my settings behind their firewall I decided to try Gmail’s hand at accessing and sending e-mail from my other business POP3 accounts with the Gmail interface.
Things were easy to setup and manage from within the interface. That was expected, as for the most part …read more

I’ve written about Xobni, the 3rd party Outlook search plug-in, a few different times on the this here website (here, here, and here). They’ve now released version 1.4 and have addressed some speed issues that a number of people mentioned in comments on my post.
The other nice thing they’ve added is the ability to immediately show LinkedIn profile information for anyone you receive an e-mail from. VERY NICE! I’ve already used it to connect with a few more people on the LinkedIn site that I didn’t realize were users.
One more feature worth mentioning is that you can now specifically …read more

I’ve been using Xobni for awhile now ever since I found it and downloaded it initially. I wrote about my experiences with the application. I’ve found that it’s really helpful in a variety of instances when looking for information in e-mail that’s in context with the task you’re trying to accomplish at the moment.
The service is now out of private beta and anyone can download and install it to see for themselves.
I’ve heard some people say that Outlook slowed down tremendously after they installed it, but I haven’t noticed anything like that up until this point during my …read more