I’ve found that this is about the length at which the eyes roll back in the head and the brain shuts down, so why go longer??

I hope that any of you who grab a copy will like it. I’d love to hear what you think. (And if you email me with an error or confusion, I’ll send you a free copy of the next work in the series!)

I get around 10,000 non-spam emails per month. I think the tactics I use will pay off for anyone handling more than 25 or 30 “real” emails per day. If you’re getting much more than 30,000 per month, you may need more sophisticated techniques.

Start with: spam filters.
I use a Bayesian one, and recommend this class of filters highly. They learn as you go from the emails that you mark as spam, and from the ones that you fish out of your email box as non-spam. After a few weeks of using one, you should be catching the vast majority of your spam, and have a false positive rate in around one or two tenths of one percent.

Follow with: threading.
Having your conversations collected by thread is critical. Not everyone “snips” well. (Snipping is cutting out the parts of the prior email that aren’t necessary for context, so that the whole thing isn’t miles long, and you can find the new entry whether it’s top posted or bottom. Doing it well means keeping enough but not too much to supply context.)

Next: subject filters and specialized boxes.
Most of my non-spam email comes from the listservs to which I belong. I filter all of that into special in-boxes, with one for each active list, and one for all of the inactive ones. These are all in a separate folder that I can look at when I have time.

Everything that doesn’t fit a bulk category goes into the general email box, and this tends to be either junk or urgent stuff. It also tends to be pretty small amounts.

Saving emails:
I have dozens of subject boxes, in nested folders (each layer gets more specific), and my email client program automatically indexes them for searching by subject, addressee and sender, or by keywords within the email. I take emails from my current in boxes and file them in these subject boxes when I have made whatever responses or actions are required.

To Do boxes:
If there are long-term projects or issues, I tend to create a to-do box for them, and file emails inside it, even if the action hasn’t been completed. Some of these take such a long time that my other active boxes get overwhelmed. It’s hard to keep track of more than 20 active emails in a box — or at most, 50.

Just so you don’t miss me too much, I’m sharing my favorite procrastination:
LOLcats!

Many of you know that I’m a mom and a knitter in my "real life." If you share those characteristics, or simply share my slightly screwball sensibiity, you’ll also like the blog,So The Thing Is . . .

And now, back to our regularly scheduled (or rather IRregularly scheduled) posts. Enjoy.

I’ll blog more about it, and possible improvements, later.

Do please send me questions about any aspect of publishing, except submissions to publishers. I’ll be happy to try to answer.