When I first started working in an office environment I would get hundreds of emails every day. Regardless of the various types of office work I have done since then, I have always had huge numbers of emails each day. If I had not found a method of organising these emails then I would never have achieved anything since I would have been thoroughly overwhelmed. I began by categorising the types of emails I received each day. These generally fell into the following categories; emails from clients, emails from contacts, Spam and junk emails, personal emails, colleague emails and auto-generated system emails. There are several ways to organise them. The aim is to ensure that you can find emails at a later date easily and without the need for extensive searches.

The first step should always be reducing the amount of Spam that reaches your inbox. Sometimes a company can receive so much Spam that there is no way they can physically read and deal with it all. There are many software packages designed to deal with this problem and increase security such as Websense, which was formerly Surfcontrol and BlackSpider. These allow Spam emails to be dumped without ever reaching the employee. A report can be generated to view the emails in case anything designated and removed as Spam is in fact required. Once a Spam filter is in place, this should dramatically decrease the amount of time you spend reading and deleting emails as well as stopping rogue emails penetrating your system.

The remaining emails should be easier to manage since they are easier to categorise. Consider the type of work you do and look for a structure to sort the emails. If you are an account manager for example then it might be worth organising your emails via client. Microsoft Outlook does allow you to create a simple folder structure. Create one folder per client along with any sub categories you may require. Each time an email comes in you can simply drag it into the correct folder. This will make searching for the email at a later date much easier, particularly as the emails can be automatically sorted by date, sender and a number of other categories. Separate folders can be created for personal emails.

An employee can further utilise this structure by creating automatic rules to place emails in folders directly without having to read them first. A folder with an unread email will show up as bold just like the Inbox. This is more useful for the system generated emails. One company I worked with had the system automatically generate emails for a number of procedures that I would never need to be informed of. Having set up a folder to contain these emails I set up a rule, which automatically sent them to the folder. Every now and again I would quickly skim over them and mass delete them. Rules are a brilliant way to organise emails since there are so many different aspects you can sort on and you can even delete automatically. The rules are very simple to set up since it is via a simple wizard format showing all the options on tabs. From the Tools menu select Rules and Alerts and create a new rule.

Inbox emails need to be organised, but do not forget that Sent emails can be just as vital to arrange. I have had a problem many times where I have completed some work for a client who then says I have not done what they asked for. It is very satisfying to be able to send them the email I saved where they requested exactly what I gave them. The sent emails should be organised in the same way as the Inbox to avoid confusion. At some point it may be worth going through all the emails and archiving anything that is no longer relevant. In this way you will be able to feel in complete control and manage your emails effectively.