How many e-mails did you have to plough through when you got back to work this year?
And how many of those were ones you hadn't dealt with before you left for Christmas?
PHOTO: AP
We're now sending and receiving so much e-mail -- 35 billion messages a day worldwide, according to IDC researchers -- that it is easy to get overwhelmed.
Even after you have read and responded to a message you still need to keep track of it, either for practical or legal reasons.
Multiply the filing and archiving by everyone in your company and you have a headache that is only going to get worse.
The information in old e-mails can be valuable (for business continuity) or very expensive (if you need to produce a message to comply with legislation like the new Freedom of Information Act).
EDS estimates that it spent US$4.7 million finding and retrieving e-mail messages that the company was required to produce for just one court action last year.
The first step is coping with e-mail as it arrives.
Some of that you can do with appropriate rules: you do not want every mailing list or RSS feed you are signed up to clogging up your main inbox, so create a rule that files them in a folder.
Spam Filters
Make sure you have a good spam filter and develop a system for working with the messages you have to act on.
This can be as simple as dragging them into folders based on different projects.
There are also tools that help implement time-management systems, such as FranklinCovey's PlanPlus and Getting Things Done.
The need for discipline does not end once you've read your mail.
As with any other important information, it is important to back it up regularly.
And if you are using an older version of Outlook and your e-mail does not stay on a Microsoft Exchange server, you need to make sure your mailbox does not exceed 2GB or Outlook will have problems accessing it.
For individuals, exporting all the messages in a folder -- last year's mail or a project you've finished -- will give you a file you can burn to CD.
Email Archives
Outlook's AutoArchive feature (under Tools/Options/Other/AutoArchive) can archive individual folders.
You just need to choose how old messages need to be to get archived, and how often Outlook does the archiving.
With other e-mail clients you may have to extract and delete the messages by hand.
Either way, put the archive files on to a server that is regularly backed up or save them on to CD and keep them at another location for extra security.
If you have a Google Gmail account, you can set your normal e-mail address to forward to it.
That will back up 1GB of e-mail in easily searchable online storage, though you might not want to store very confidential messages there.
Companies with lots of users need something more formal.
If you use Exchange, keep messages on the server and synchronize to desktops and laptops rather than downloading them permanently.
That way you can backup e-mails along with all the other documents on the server.
It's more convenient too -- if you upgrade to a new desktop PC, or if you lose your laptop, your messages are not gone for good.
Also, mobile users can read messages from a laptop, mobile phone or via a web browser, so they can access important e-mails wherever they are.
The problem with backing up e-mails using traditional tools is that it becomes much harder to find individual messages -- you have to restore all the messages in the backup, or wait for the help desk to do it, before you can search through them.
E-mail archiving makes it easier to find and retrieve individual messages.
Products such as Enterprise Vault let you specify which messages need to be stored for legal reasons, and which are useful enough to keep.
You do not want to waste space on messages about leaving parties and clearing up after yourself in the kitchen.
The software indexes the mail contents and takes out duplicate messages to save space.
NetReplay offers similar features and handles Webmail and instant messaging conversations as well as e-mail.
Backup Providers
If you do not have an IT department to run this kind of system, try the online backup providers, who are starting to offer more sophisticated services.
Iron Mountain is planning to bring its US e-mail archiving service to the UK, "when the demand is there."
This uses Legato's EmailXtender software to capture and forward specific e-mails, attachments and instant message sessions to Iron Mountain's web-hosted digital archive, where messages are indexed.
When you need an archived message, you can retrieve it from your normal e-mail software.
Tools such as these are relatively new, so it is unclear who the big players are going to be.
However, such archives are the next logical step for making the most of information that would otherwise be locked away.
Whether you are dealing with e-mail in your inbox, in your filing system or recovered from a backup, finding the message you want can take too long.
Outlook's built-in search is painfully slow.
The Search Folders in Outlook 2003 are an excellent idea -- they are virtual folders so you can organize your mail without moving any of it.
This means you do not end up with a fixed hierarchy of folders that does not match the overlaps and complexity of some real-world projects.
They can also be slow if you have a large mailbox.
The Activities tab inside a contact address gives you a list of all the related e-mails, appointments and attachments for that person but again, it takes time to build the list.
Instead of spending time filing messages, check out Microsoft's new version of the excellent LookOut software it bought last year.
This is integrated into the MSN Toolbar.
You can get the toolSN Toolbar Suite improves on LookOut in a few ways.
You can search while it is building the index so you don't have to wait half an hour after you install it, and you can see the first few lines of each matching message.
You can also choose the type of attachment you want to look for (presentation, spreadsheet, photo and so on).
Google's Desktop Search searches e-mails as well as files on your computer's hard drive.
Zoe takes a slightly different approach; it indexes messages and extracts details of the sender, any attachments and hyperlinks.
You can search for a term and see the messages containing that word.
You can also browse the list of people who have sent messages referring to that word and see the URLs from their messages.
Click on a name and you see all the messages a person has sent you.
As well as searching for particular e-mails, you can view the structures of projects you work on and teams you work with.
Zoe acts as a mail client and server, so you can access both the messages and the index over the web -- and it is free.
However, like many opensource programs, it can be tricky to set up.
There is also a paid-for version that is called Zoe Professional, with extra user management features that integrate with Microsoft Exchange.
There is no reason why it should be harder to find a mail you sent last year than to look up obscure facts on the web.
Your first priority is to backup your e-mail securely and use tools that make it easy to extract information.
Then you can turn your inbox from a discomforting tangle into a valuable resource.
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