Earlier in the week I had talked to a friend about my unmanageable email pile in my Inbox, about 78 pieces of email just sitting there, dwelling on the edge of my consciousness and weighing on me. Is there something there that I should take care of? Did I miss something important? So I started to chat and to do some research.

There are many strategies out there, and I adapted them for my own use, and so far it has worked out marvelously well. Here’s how I process my email:

1. Create sorting folders. I created a host of new subfolders in my work email account which runs under a hosted version of Microsoft Exchange. Because folders sort alphabetically, I forced the sort using number indexes and dashes.
   1. 1-Email Management
      1. 1-Today
      2. 2-This Week
      3. 3-This Quarter
      4. 4-FYI
      5. 5-Toodledo
      6. 6-Done/Sort
   2. 2-Help Desk
   3. 3-To Evernote
   4. 4-Barracuda
   5. 5-Syslog Alerts
   6. 6-ATP
2. Then I sort the Inbox into the “Email Management” folder structure. If something has to be done today, it goes to 1-Today, and so on and so forth. My first consideration is the due-date for the item in my Inbox. If the item is purely informational, it goes into the 4-FYI box.
3. I have rules set up in my email application, which happens to be Apple Mail. If I get email from Toodledo, my favorite To-Do system, they are moved into that folder. Anything from my Spiceworks Ticket sytem ends up in the 2-Help Desk folder. The messages from my Barracuda backup appliance end up in the 4-Barracuda folder, all my incoming Kiwi Syslog alerts end up in 5-Syslog Alerts, and finally the Advanced Threat Protection from Hosted Exchange reports get filed in 6-ATP. Rules are a huge part of keeping your neck above water when it comes to emails. There are a lot of purely informational emails that have zero urgency and very low importance, you want to keep them to go through them, but they don’t need to clog up your Inbox. Rules can help you sweep a lot of these away automatically. Always flag your junk mail, review that occaisonally to drag it for any false-positives.
4. If an item is a request for help from work, and it didn’t come in as a ticket originally, those need to be pushed into the ticketing system. Thankfully Spiceworks allows you to forward emails into the ticket system by sending forwarded mail to whatever mailbox you’ve configured for the Spiceworks system. There are a litany of hashtag controls you can place in the email body to configure how tickets are arranged. My Cisco CUCM system is configured to also kick voicemails to me as attached MP3 emails, if they are requests for help, they likewise end up being forwarded with some extra flavor text to stomp down on confusion.
5. If an item isn’t help, is urgent, is rather important, and has a clear date and time I will forward the email to my Toodledo using the configured email address on that system. Toodledo has a flag system that works on the Subject line. My preferred method is to alert people to events, include Toodledo as a BCC addressee, and then add at the end of the Subject line this text fragment: @work :1 day #{duedate} where the field duedate is whatever the date is that is relevant. Send it, forget it, it’s in the Toodledo list.
6. The next step is to cycle through folders in Email Management, starting with Today and then reviewing all the rest. The Today folder is the action items that can be done today, or are due today. After completion, simple things are thrown away, but anything more elaborate or anything that touches on CYA gets sorted into the 3-To Evernote Folder.
7. Evernote is a bottomless notekeeping system that I also use, and I leverage Evernote as a destination for all my CYA emails, and each quarter the extracted Sent Items from my Exchange account. I don’t trust Microsoft at all, I’d rather keep things in Evernote. Microsoft has a 50GB quota, Evernote does not have a quota. At the end of each week, I have a “Sharpen The Saw” task in Toodledo that I run, and a part of that is running along the structure in the 3-To Evernote folder, which includes all the emails across the branches of the company I work for, and all the vendors I have relationships with. Every Quarter, I search for all the emails for the previous block of time, soon Q1-2019 will be over so I search for all Q1-2019 emails and also move them into Evernote.
   1. The Evernote move is accomplished in two steps. The first step is to extract all the attachments out of the emails in my Exchange account, I use Mac Automator for that purpose, and here’s how it’s configured:
      1. Get Selected Mail Messages – Get selected messages.
      2. Get Attachments from Mail Messages – Save attachments in: “Attachments”
   2. I then run the Automator workflow, and all the attachments are put in a folder on my Desktop called Attachments. I then bulk rename them with their folder, a date such as 20190301 (YYYYMMDD), and then select them all and drag them into the right notebook in Evernote.
   3. Then I highlight all the relevant emails in my Mail App that I intend to send to Evernote, and I have created a General Service in my Mac called “Send To Evernote” which is actually another Automator Workflow, called “Send To Evernote.workflow”, that has this content:
      1. Run AppleScript:

         1. on run {input, parameters}
             -- Slightly modified version of Efficient Computing's AppleScript: http://efficientcomputing.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2012/03/17/copy-email-message-in-mail-app-to-evernote-applescript/
             tell application "Mail"
              --get selected messages
              set theSelection to selection
              --loop through all selected messages
              repeat with theMessage in theSelection
               --get information from message
               set theMessageDate to the date received of theMessage
               set theMessageSender to sender of theMessage
               set theMessageSubject to the subject of the theMessage
               set theMessageContent to the content of theMessage
               set theMessageURL to "message://%3c" & theMessage's message id & "%3e"
               --make a short header
               set theHeader to the all headers of theMessage
               set theShortHeader to (paragraph 1 of theHeader & return & paragraph 2 of theHeader & return & paragraph 3 of theHeader & return & paragraph 4 of theHeader & return & return)
               --import message to Evernote
               tell application "Evernote"
                set theNewNote to (create note with text (theShortHeader & theMessageContent))
                set the title of theNewNote to theMessageSubject
                set the source URL of theNewNote to theMessageURL
                set the creation date of theNewNote to theMessageDate
               end tell
               -- move the email message to archive and make it bloody obvious
               set background color of theMessage to blue
               set acc to account of mailbox of theMessage
               move theMessage to mailbox "Archive" of acc
              end repeat
             end tell
             return input
            end run

             

      2. It takes some time, but it efficiently moves the text parts of the emails selected into Evernote, using my default Notebook, called IN BOX.
      3. I select everything in the Evernote notebook IN BOX and move it to where it has to go, the destination notebook within Evernote itself. The messages all end up in the Archive folder, so then after that I hunt them down and delete them out of Exchange. Then empty the trash out of Exchange.
8. In the end, I have a very slim Exchange account, a well fleshed out Evernote data store where I can search for all my email CYA details that I might need later on, and it also works on the web and over mobile apps as well. It’s very handy.
9. It only took me a little while, maybe an hour tops to sort my Inbox and get to Inbox Zero. Then the cycling through the subfolders helped give me a handle on both urgency and importance, and I have a far better sense that I am actually on-top of my emails.