Email Management: What You Need to Know

 An organizational area that continues to frustrate many businesses and their employees is email management. Given that email isn’t exactly a new technological development, why does email management continue to irritate and confound IT departments across the world? If you have a decade’s worth of email cluttering up your inbox and you can’t locate a specific message, you may be in need of email migration.

Email is a continuous, ongoing form of communication: you can never have total control over the incoming flow. This means that you have to think about ways in which you can improve the way your email infrastructure works.

The current trend that many businesses are following appears to be that of moving to cloud services, which are provided by companies like Mimecast. Before you attempt migrating your email content to a cloud, you may want to get the basics sorted out before you do.

Use organizing folders

Just as you would use folders to organize your papers at home, you should employ folders within your email inboxes, too. Descriptive folders and sub-folders will enable you to keep all emails organized and easily accessible.

Advise your employees to use descriptive labels so that pulling up old messages can be done swiftly and with ease. You’ll find that this will increase productivity and decrease the amount of time spent looking for old correspondence.

Archiving your old mail

After you’ve taken efforts to eradicate and delete all your unwanted emails, it’s time to turn your attention to the emails that you can’t delete: not all mail is junk, after all. With a business, you’ll have to store large amounts of emails, in a manner akin to financial statements, receipts, invoices, contracts and so on.

It’s important to get into the habit of moving these old emails to a local archive. Neglecting to do so will just mean that your inbox will get clogged up again. Removing the emails from your mail PST file will keep the amount of messages there small and manageable. This means your inbox will be sorted and uncluttered, making accessibility much easier.

Routing emails in your inbox

Instead of manually moving emails into the folders you’ve set up, it’ll be easier and far less time consuming to set up ‘rules’ for receiving emails. Most email providers have this ability. All you need to do is to establish the rules that certain emails will be automatically routed into your specified folders.

For instance, if your company has subscribed to another company’s newsletter, you can automatically route them into a specified folder so that they do not accumulate in your inbox, cluttering it up.

These methods are merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to managing your company’s email system. The thing to remember is that you should always endeavour to have a robust, organized email system; this will increase productivity by reducing the amount of time that might otherwise be wasted.