This article link will provide some great insight into Spam..  Things like who has the best and worst IT security, how much space is wasted, etc…

1 Billion Spammers Served | Deep Insights into Spam | Project Honey Pot

Check it out!

As you all know I use ClearContext’s Outlook Addon to help me manage my email… and below you will find a snippet of an article and a link to help with the management of vacation email.  If you don’t use ClearContext I would encourage you to take a look while you are there… they have a free version that you can download to give it a try.  Once you’ve gone ClearContext you won’t go back… at least I never did!

“Here are some tips to help you cope with an avalanche of email after a vacation:

Use ClearContext’s AutoAssign rules to quickly categorize and file messages. We all receive informational messages from the usual suspects; email that we like to review such as newsletters and company updates, but is not time sensitive. Upon your return, create some rules to quickly file newsletters, bulk mail, non-critical corporate updates, etc.. Put them out of the way and review at your leisure after you’ve had the chance to catch up on your important email.

Delete or file unimportant messages. After you’ve cleared out the informational emails, use ClearContext’s Prioritized view to see your email listed in priority order. Utilizing CC’s default scoring parameters, the gray messages at the bottom of your Inbox can almost certainly be deleted with little or no review – all of these emails are from unknown senders, are not addressed directly to you, and are likely spam. If you’re worried about bulk deleting, move them to a review file for consumption after you’ve had the chance to…”

ClearContext Corporate Blog: Vacation Email Triage.

Use the email traffic reduction tips below to combat spam and carbon copy bloat and secure the sanctity of the inbox.

1. Maintain multiple email addresses.

Set up personal and public email account(s) in addition to work email. Use the personal account for friends and family and the public account for online shopping, newsletters, etc.. Never give out the work address for non-work related reasons.

2. Don’t post an email address in public places.

Marketing companies harvest email from public places on the net. Refrain from posting an address on websites, in newsletters, or in email groups to avoid identification by these companies. When posting is inevitable, use the public email address.

Read more via ClearContext Corporate Blog: Top 5 Ways to Reduce Email Traffic.

I absolutely love Gmail… Over the years it has become my collection point for all of my email accounts.   I forward anything and everything personal to that account and use it to archive the things I want to keep.  When I was not able to log in for a couple of hours it had me asking myself a couple of questions… First – should I be putting all of my eggs in one basket?  I don’t suspect that Google will be going away any time soon but at the same time I also can’t help but wonder what I would do if a 2 hour outage turned into 12 hours or 18 hours or days?  The second question – Does it really matter?  I should probably just consider it Google’s way of giving me a break from the increasingly awful thing called email.  My email free Monday afternoon.   Many companies and individuals are subscribing to the email free days… I think I need to break into it a few hours at a time…  Thanks Google for reminding me to try it again.

Google did post a blog article that you can find here. They called it We Feel Your Pain and We’re Sorry.  I’m not quite sure HOW they felt my pain but I took comfort in knowing that they apologized and they are using it as a learning experience.

1. Send Less Receive Less
2. Say Less to Say More
3. Sort Email Using the 80/20 Rule
4. Ask to Opt Out of Some Lists
5. Manage your Email Time Explicitly
6. Put the Burden on Them
7. When in Doubt – Save!

I do many of these today and let me tell you from an experience standpoint #1 and #5 have been huge in getting through the piles of email that I receive.

Take a look at his posting and if you’ve got other ideas and advice to offer I would love to hear it!

Unfortunately, I still have Xobni uninstalled.  There are two primary hurdles that still present themselves which I am currently unable to get past on my primary work machine.

First, I periodically use a Satellite connection through a VPN to connect to our corporate email Exchange server.  When I operate in that environment with Xobni installed, my Outlook become unbearably slow.  What is unbearably slow… well let’s just say that I could type a complete sentence pick up the phone, look up a phone number and dial that number and when I look at the screen the sentence will not be visible in its entirety.  (In all fairness to what I consider to be a great application this slowdown does not seem to exist on my high speed (DSL) connection when connected through our VPN.)  Since I spend about 40-50% of my time in that satellite environment I can’t deal with the extreme slowness.

Second, is that I still have the issue of improper shutdown of Outlook.  This causes corruption in my mailstores which take absolutely forever to rebuild when I restart Outlook.  Things that I have tried to do to resolve this problem…

Archive messages – I have nearly 100,000 messages and I have now broken them all into separate mailstores by year to get their file sizes down.

Upgrade to Outlook 2007 – Recently I made a change to Outlook 2007 thinking perhaps there may have been an issue with 2003 an the interaction with other applications.  (I had another selfish reason – I wanted the ClearContext beta and right now it only runs on 2007)

Rebuild the mailstores with ScanPST – I have rebuilt each and every one of the mailstores (archives included) thinking that any errors that would be found and corrected may ultimately resolve the shutdown problem.

Uninstalled other Outlook applications – This would include my most favorite application of all ClearContext.  The problem doesn’t seem to be tied to addons because I had the same result.

In fairness again, you should know that I have a second machine that I use for personal mail and it does not have this Second problem.  I don’t carry this machine up to the lake house so I have no idea if it has the first.

I have been in email contact with the Xobni support department on these issues and have tried multiple things believing that there may be a solution in place.   Support for the most part is quite responsive unfortunately they just can’t seem to figure out how to resolve these two showstopper issues for me.

So the bottom line for me is to periodically install the app and see if I am able to close down Outlook without either a C Runtime error or an Outlook error indicating that things didn’t close properly.  Once I consistently get shutdown happening then I will try it on the Satellite connection.

On a side note, even though I have these two problems I would encourage you to try Xobni if you haven’t.  The search capability is absolutely incredible, and the contact information and management is what Outlook should have done!

They just entered into open (non-invite) beta so the application is available to all.  (Make sure that if you experience either of my two problems that you let their support department know about it!!!)  You can see their press release here or better yet just go to the Xboni website and download it.

1. Shut off auto check
2. Pick off easy ones
3. Write less
4. Cheat
5. Be honest

When you are there you might also check out the little Related area just to the right of the article.  You will find a couple of other great nuggets of email productivity information there as well. 

Remember that email should be a tool that enables communication.  What I am finding in this day and age is that while people certainly communicate it is becoming ever more difficult to get things done as you read through the avalanche of email with useless, unnecessary communication. We’ve reached communication overload because it is so easy now.   Stay productive by incorporating a few of these useful tips.

Email is a strange thing.  The more you send the more you get which causes you to send more and you end up in this vicious cycle where you can’t seem to get caught up.   If email is part of your work this can result in literally hundreds of email exchanges in a day.   The purpose of this Blog Carnival is to highlight what others are doing to become more productive with their email and to keep email as a friendly medium not something that you HATE to visit every day.

Email Etiquette

On my blog here – ProjectsPossible you will find the post: Email Overload and Reminders – The Nagless, Productive Way! This post highlights a real effective strategy of getting a response to things that you need without really looking like you are nagging the person that you are needing to get it from.   I use this one all the time.  It works great!

Email Utilities and Addons

This category lists posts that point us to other programs that we can install that will help us in our goal of increased email productivity.   They will fall into the categories of spam filters, information management, searching, indexing, or in some cases the email program themselves.

Spam is a nasty problem, but then so are all of those mailed pieces of junk mail that I never open and just toss into the recycle bin.  Nesher presents 30 Top Freeware Spam Filters as posted at Freeware Reviews.  This post also has some interesting statistics about spam.   Scroll to the bottom for the link to the 30 Filters.   I have used Spam Bayes and I find it one of the best out there. 

Nesher also presents another list: 40 Free Disposable Email Address Services to Fight Spam posted at Collection of the Web Freebies, saying, “The best way to avoid spam in your mailbox is not giving your address to the potentially spammers. Free disposable addersses will assist you to keep your address safe.”  I’ve never really considered this as an option because usually when I leave my email I am wanting a response back or something similar and I don’t want to have to go to a ton of different email addresses to find what I’m looking for.   Again the rateitall link is at the bottom of the page.

For those of you that use your email to make money, Robbie presents Money Talks: Using Autoresponders posted at MMS Make Money Online.  The purpose of these autoresponding programs is to make sure that when someone does send you an email that they receive some kind of information or exchange in return.   For example if someone is seeking general information they could send an email to a specific address and an autoresponder would send them a brochure.   Personally I think there is a fine line between a true autoresponse and spam.   Take a look there are a number of suggestions.  Some better than others for sure.

Email and Creativity

In this category our lone entry goes to Madeleine Begun Kane she presents Spam Haiku posted at Mad Kane’s Humor Blog.  You can’t take life too seriously and Madeline has done a great job in the area of Spam Humor.

Email Tips and Tricks

The Art of Personal Productivity presents How to Answer E-Mail Overload posted at The Bubble Planner.  The methodology mentioned here is very similar to what you will find with the Getting Things Done movement.   File It, Delegate It, Do It, or Defer It.

Our last posting for this month comes from Guy Patterson. If you use a Blackberry and Microsoft Exchange this How-To article provides you with the “need to know” information to get encryption working.  Blackberry & Microsoft Exchange Email Encryption How To – Nullamatix – Technology Made Simple posted at Nullamatix – Technology & Security Made Simple.

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of email productivity using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Technorati tags: email productivity, blog carnival.

To set the stage I think it is important to understand what a “blog carnival” is.    If you look at the Wikipedia link you will see that a “blog carnival” is a blog event.  It is described a really nothing more than a collection of permalinks on a particular topic.  It is likened to a “magazine” in that the host, acting as the editor, compiles the stories into a post and lists all of the links to the blog articles that were submitted.  The readers of the post have a plethora of information at their fingertips on a specific topic, and the blog authors have a link back to their blog.

The Email Productivity Carnival is anticipated to be a monthly compilation of blog posts related to email productivity and email tools that increase productivity.  Submissions will be accepted through the last day of the month and then I will edit them and create a posting in the “Carnival” category on the Projects Possible blog approximately 1 week later.

Article or Post Suggestions:

• Reviews of software applications
• Tips and Tricks
• Email Etiquette
• Feature and Functionality of Mail Clients

The Email Productivity Blog Carnival is posted on Blog Carnival if you would like to submit links.   You can also submit links by clicking on the Contact link at the top of all of the blog pages.   Comments on this post might also work but there is no guarantee that I will get them included in every posting…

Check back around March 8th for our first posting…