Spring Cleaning #29: Email

All staff members have an HCPL email account. We're all guilty at times of ending up with excess old emails. While some of those emails are important, a lot of them can be deleted or moved to other storage. In this exercise, we'll look at tips and techniques for dealing with email.

Old emails need to be deleted or relocated to another location to save. While it is OK to receive some personal emails, remember that this is not a personal email account and is not private. If you need to set up a free personal email account see the iStar Tip on Email. Do NOT give out your staff email address for anything non-work related. It is recommended that you use your personal email address for personal correspondence.

My email is out of control, what should I do?

Clean Out Your Computer Day Tips & Ideas offers several suggestions for getting control over email:

• Go through your inbox and delete old messages and spam - then empty the trash. Don't forget to delete personal emails or forward them to your personal email account.
• Make sure you delete emails with attachments - save the attachment if you need to, but attachments take up a lot of storage space on the email server.
• Create an email filing system that makes sense to you.
• When you get a new email, take one of four actions: reply immediately, delete the message, forward - when appropriate, or file in the appropriate folder

While we're primarily talking about cleaning up our email accounts in this exercise, we'd like to mention a couple of tips for good Netiquette (online etiquette) regarding email:

• If you're sending a large file to multiple people, use the S drive (shared drive) rather than sending it by email. We'll be discussing the S drive in the next post. Alternately, use a service like YouSendIt, which lets you send up to 100 MB files to anyone for free.
  
• Don't forward non-work related emails to whole mailing lists of people. In fact, it's good practice to check and see if that warning about the computer virus you got from your Uncle Fred is true using a site such as Snopes.com before you forward an email like that to anyone, even with your personal email account.

Exercise:

1. If you do not have a personal email account create one using one of the above mentioned options to use for your personal email.
2. On your work account, create folders (if you don't have them) and clean out/move emails in all folders or forward to your personal account.
3. Clean out and update your address book
4. Write an entry in your blog (or send an email to your supervisor) about deleting files and your plan for keeping your email account up-to-date and clutter free in the future.

This post was brought to you by Abigail Buchold, Bruce Farrar, Grace Lillevig, & Sandra Silvey.