Thursday, January 22, 2009

Take Care of the Bacon, Y'All!

I think I got this from Merlin Mann. It works.

You already know what spam is--it's the stuff you don't want. Well, there are less-important emails you also received from organizations and other stuff you signed up for, but you don't really want to read it often. This stuff is called bacon.

Bacon is really annoying in the inbox. I really just want to see email I'm interested in reading in my inbox. So I decided to do something about it. Since I use Outlook, I created a rule that puts emails from certain email addresses into a special folder called "Bacon" (oddly enough). I've placed this folder beneath my JunkMail folder. As new bacon arrives in my inbox, I add the new email to the rule I created.

Now when I check email, I see the emails I'm most interested in when looking at my Inbox. I then use the Unread Mail filter (saved to favorites) to quickly review all my Bacon and see if I want to read any of it. Otherwise, I can quickly delete.

I also have emails filing themselves upon arrival, and read them all in the Unread Mail filter. This is especially handy if you can predict the subject line (especially from mailing lists that put a prefix in the subject), or if the email is always from or sent to a specific email address.

This all makes email much more painless!

What other tricks do you use to help with your influx of emails? Please share in the comments!

1 comment:

Collin Kromke said...

A couple months ago I abandoned Outlook. I have a gmail address and was reading my email in Outlook and decided to cut the cord and go completely web based. It's been liberating. Gmail has so much storage space that any emails I don't delete I can put in my archive forever, out of my inbox. The best part is that I can find any email I've archived with the search function, and we all know how good Google is with search!