Any busy person, including academics, will probably tell you that email management is one of the biggest challenges they face. Many of the online resources for email management put all the onus on the recipient. These two put the focus back on those we send. The first is about how to write sensible emails, that is, ones that don’t waste people’s time; the second is how to go about making requests by email (both via here).

That said, while we can only hope more and more people get better at sending emails – read the email charter! – the chances are we are still going to have to plough through a wide range of messages. I’ve previously written about my method of handling email and a day in email.

But I’ve recently discovered SaneBox. It’s wonderful, and I’d strongly encourage people to try it out. It works in a number of ways, but the most basic is that it filters your messages for you, putting only some in your inbox, and separating out bulk emails, email lists, unimportant messages, auto-replies, etc. None of these are lost, just not put in your inbox. You can train it to recognise messages from certain people or lists. The point is that the @sanelater folder, which includes all filtered messages, should be checked less regularly when you can process such messages in bulk. When you receive something and you never want to see similar again, you can drop the message into @saneblackhole and it will do that for every such message. This is much better, and much quicker, than unsubscribing. You can drag and drop messages into @sanetomorrow or @sanenextweek and they will reappear in your inbox on those days. Another neat thing you can do is to cc yourself (through a simple code) in a message that requires a response by a certain day or time, and if you get the reply, fine; if you don’t you’ll get a reminder from sanebox with the original message. I think this is much better than making an appointment or task to trigger that action since you no longer need to find the email. I’m sure there are more tricks, but these are the ones I’m using. The key thing: no email is ever deleted (except if you’ve told it to black hole that sender); but only the most important ones appear in your inbox.

If you use this invitation URL, you will get a free 2 weeks trial and $5 in SaneBox credit: http://sanebox.com/t/50×43 – and I’ll get credit too, though i’ve already paid for a year’s subscription.