The following are examples of what not to do.

Email fail #1: Bad “From” addresses. These come straight from my mailbox:

• Programs
• No-reply
• Customer_service
• Salesusa
• Admin
• Register
• Contact

These “From” addresses give no clue as to where the email has come from or what to do with it.  If these emails had used the company’s name or the sender’s name, they’d be much more useful.

When the time comes that you need a writer, you might scan your mailbox to jog your memory for a writer you know. So which email will you open? An email from  “Contact”, “noname@gmail.com” or “Meryl K. Evans”? You can change what appears in the “From” line for most email clients in settings. In Gmail, for example, you can change your “From”  address under the “Accounts” tab.

Email fail #2: Bad subject lines. Again, these come straight from my inbox:

• Order number 1234
• Your payment has been processed
• [Blank]
• Careers update

Bad subject lines are unspecific (like “Careers update”) or worse, totally lacking useful information that could easily be included. The first two examples here would be much more useful if they told me what company and product these emails were pertaining to. A blank subject line is all too common. If you can’t be bothered to write a subject line, why should I open your email?

Email fail #3: Lacking signature. Once the reader has opened your email, take it a step further by including contact and other relevant business information in your signature, as not everyone will want to look up your web site.

What to put in your signature depends on your business, but I find it useful to break my signature into two parts: what I do and links to my social network profiles. It’s longer than I would like, but grouping the information into two sections makes it less intrusive. Here’s my signature:

Meryl K. Evans
Content Maven for Hire
Writing :: Editing :: Research
Web site: http://www.meryl.net/

Connect
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/meryl
Facebook: http://meryl.net/shorty/facebook/
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/merylkevans

Before listing my social network links, I had links to a couple of books I had authored. When the books got “old,” the links to my social network profiles replaced them.

Now is a good time to do a review of your email account for the three simple things that can make a great difference in your email effectiveness: “From”, “Subject” and a useful signature. With today’s overwhelmed inboxes, your emails need to say, “Open me.” Give them all the help you can.

Share your email tips in the comments.

Image by stock.xchng user CarrieAlli.

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For many years, I used Eudora as my email client. I loved it. I could back my emails up easily, and I could create folders, and folders within those folders, and could further nest folders as deep as I wanted them. So for example, I could have a “Clients” folder and, within that, have a folder for each client, then within each client folder, have one for each project I was working on, and then also have an “Archival” folder to dump past project folders. I felt so organized.

I recently saw a presentation at Ignite Anchorage by photographer Oscar Avellaneda about email organization using Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu principles. That presentation rocked my world while I watched it, but putting his incredible tips into actual practice feels like climbing Mount Everest to me. It ain’t gonna happen in this lifetime, no matter how much I dream about it.

Since adopting Gmail several years ago, I’ve found that its drawbacks are almost equal to its benefits but am now too entrenched in the habit of using it to change (see my post about trying to adopt Postbox, a nifty email client that I probably really should be using). For me, the biggest drawback with Gmail is the label/folder system. I know there is some funky way of nesting folders, but I just can’t seem to be able to figure it out.

So I now have all the labels sitting on one level, instead of being nested, which makes for a terrifyingly long list of folders in which to file my emails. I put asterisks in front of the folders that I want to rise to the top of my label list for easier access. I also move archival folders — about a dozen of them — to the bottom of the list by putting a “Z” in front of them.

Another big struggle for me is importing emails from some of my other accounts into my main account. If I import them using POP3, they automatically get put into one of the folders instead of my inbox, and I sometimes end up missing them.

My scariest folder is labeled “Read This!” That’s where I have my favorite email newsletters and RSS feed subscriptions go. Right now there are 2,097 unread emails in there. I shudder to think of it and do occasionally delete a few pages of the oldest ones in a fit of panic over the huge amounts of information I’m just unable to consume.

For clients, I struggle with adding more individual client folders because of the unwieldy length of my folder list, so many client emails are relegated to “Client Misc,” for no other reason than I’m trying not to create any more new labels right now.

I’m open to any ideas, suggestions, and mind melds to shake myself free of these bad email organizational habits. And I have to confess, I’m so glad this isn’t a series called “What’s In Your Inbox?” With 9,743 unread emails in my Inbox, I’m paralyzed with fear. 9,744. 9,745…

How do you organize your email?

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