re: Mail stress.

Jonathan Medd — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 14:13:38 GMT

Fascinating and amusing post!

Another horror story which seems to have really become prevalent this year is we see a lot of people who daily access their email whilst on holiday because they can't face coming back to hundreds of emails after a couple of weeks off and having to waste 2 days clearing it out before actually getting back into some useful work. This surely defeats the object of having a holiday.

It would be great if the Out Of Office feature could prompt you as you hit the send button with something like 'this person is away, do you really want to send them this message?' rather than tell you after you have sent it that they are away.

Fortunately I'm not plagued by anywhere near the amount of email you receive, however I still make extensive use of Outlook rules to filter out stuff I know I won't want / need to read. (Not sure if you use them much because its not touched on in the post?)

Typically we recieve stuff in the following categories and I have rules which dump them straight in the bin so I never even see them.

* - Group wide job vacancies reminder every week - If I want to look at the vacanices list I'll just do it, I don't need to be reminded every week that it exists.

* - Updates to company policies (almost daily!). Again if I need one, I just go grab it off the Intranet, I don't need to know it has had a minor update.

* - Subjects like No Milk Today / the lift isn't working / Parking / etc

On thing I thought has always been missing from Exchange (maybe its possible in 2007) is a subscription / RSS Feed type scenario where you actively sign up for receiving these kind of messages if you want them, they're not rammed down your throat whether you want them or not.

I have another rule for emails where I'm CC'd which get moved to a review type folder that I can quickly scan through and typically do not need to reply to.

Consequently I have one of the cleanest mailboxes amongst colleagues without even actioning anything.

Another slightly off the wall tack I have taken with rules is to play different sounds when mail arrives from certain people (volume is low so I don't annoy those around me). Whilst this started out as a joke on a slow day, it can sometimes prove quite useful when the 'Aaaah Boogeyman' wav file kicks in; I know something needs actioning pretty quickly because its that particular person, even if I am not looking at Outlook. :-)

(PS Search folders appeared with Outlook 2003 and Exchange 2003)