ORGANIZING YOUR OUTLOOK EMAIL
ORGANIZING YOUR OUTLOOK EMAIL
Ladies and Gentlemen, please allow me to introduce to you: "Resume spam".
With a daily average fluctuating between 250 and 300 new messages in my Outlook, Auto responders, Junk Mail and Filtering are subjects near and dear my heart. I spoke with Bill about Outlook Express and its Auto respond feature. Eudora has a good one as well, and of course Outlook 2000 Pro has the most powerful one specially when used with Exchange.
The current economy opened the gates on a flood of new jobseekers. Today's jobseeker is websavvy, armed with knowledge of the Internet and likes to use that little old "Send" button. Frequently.
Mass email enables modern employment prospects to market themselves like never before. Stamps, expensive paper and envelopes were once the only barriers preventing the unemployed masses from burying your desk with resumes. Those barriers have been removed.
That said, auto responding is a courteous, efficient way to deal with professional, non-commercial, inbound mail, whether it is resume spam or solicited leads. Period.
Some mail you want to keep, some resume spam can be useful. Some mail is total junk you want to delete unread. But what about all those messages which require your action?
I've been using Outlook for the last three years and have developed quite the expertise on filtering email using the Organize function and the Rules Wizards. I also use Folders, Colors, Views and the Junk Mail feature. For those of you who want to get even more organized, I have some suggestions:
FOLDERS: I use the folder tab to select from specific senders to go in designated folders. Senders I have identified as sources of spam or adult content go in the Deleted folder, messages from family go in the Private folder, and messages from newsletters I subscribe to go in their respective folders.
COLORS: I filter messages from specific senders by coloring them in groups like gray for pseudo-junk, red for internal messages and anything marked Urgent, blue from my close friends, yellow for news, green for external business and so on. You get the picture! Its much easier to distinguish the messages this way and take appropriate action. Another tool
VIEWS: I set aside a period of time in the mid-morning just before lunch, with a cup of coffee, to go through my email and start with selecting my views. I select the view by "Conversation Topic" and this way can take action on or delete entire threads at once without having to comb through the whole mess. Next I go to the view by "Sender" and again can review all the messages from one person and either take action, move to a folder for later or delete them. Finally I choose the "Sent To" view which sorts all of what's left in a list which lets me view if they were sent to my work or private account, or if I was just copied on a message to someone else or a list. This is a great view because I can see who the message was sent to - and its not always sent directly to me. For example, messages to a list are addressed to the list and sorted that way unless they were sent directly to me. I then take action on all the ones addressed to my
JUNK: The Junk Email organizer lets you either color or move junk and porn. I choose to move them - they go in a Junk Email folder so I can keep them on record in case A) it gets out of hand and I want to take action or B) it turns out they were erroneously marked as spam and its a real email. You can also right click on a message and mark the sender as a Junk or Adult sender. This way you build your junk sender list on the fly. You can always edit this list yourself and download updates from Micro$oft.
With the Rules Wizard you have more control. There are too many features to mention but I would be glad to answer individual questions. Dealing with volume email effectively is a modern challenge but its a reality. Resume spam is not going to completely stop. In addition the list of people who use email grows so quickly that we will have to deal with ever increasing volumes of real email, never mind the Spam. Most of these features are also available in Eudora and other email clients. If you use some other email program I would be glad to discuss them with you one-on-one. Send me an email and it will color green, marked urgent, moved to the forum folder and selected under the unread messages view ;)
Read more about Spam here .
For detailed information on UBE (Unsolicited Bulk Email - Spam - Junk Mail) fighting tools: http://www.claws-and-paws.com/spam-l/?from=old-faq .
To investigate the owners of a numeric IP address: http://whois.arin.net or... http://www.amnesi.com .
To investigate the owners of a domain name: http://www.internic.net or... http://www.nsi.com .
To fight UBE and spam: http://www.cauce.org
http://aces.arbita.net/sourcer/organizingemail