Even with all the different methods of communication online (such as Twitter, RSS feeds, texting, instant messages and many more) for business owners email is the main method of communication dealing with work. It can also be the most challenging to keep organized, especially when you need to find an important email you received a few months ago from one of your contacts at a company. Fortunately todays email tools can help you stay on top of this challenge and turn your email archive from a disaster area into a useful resource.

Delete That Email

This tip has the biggest impact on the amount of emails you need to sort through in the future, but it is the hardest to do. When you read an email think to yourself, is there any realistic expectation that I will have to read this email again next year? There are definately some emails you will need to keep, such as emails authorizing you to do work, emails the tax agency may need to see in the next seven years, written agreements between two parties and any other items that prove important in any kind of audit. Office jokes, meeting reminders and short questions between peers are prime candidates for deletion.

Seperate Business From Pleasure

Just as people have a work phone number seperate from a home phone number, you should have a work email address and a home email address. Give your work email address to your professional contacts and your home email address to your family and friends. Keeping your important emails seperate from the jokes you may receive from friends improves your ability to stay organized.

Use Folders to Group Emails

Sorting your emails into different folders helps to group certain emails. Before you go making a bunch of folders, you will need to think of what you are most likely to remember when looking for an email in the future. If your company deals with many clients you may want to have folders for each client. If you work on projects with many people involved you may want to have folder for each project. There is no single structure of folders that will work for everybody, but be careful when creating them. Folders can be great at organizing but having too many folders can be difficult to manage going forward.

Don’t Forget Sent Items

By default most email programs save a copy of each email you send, so you will want to organize these as well. You can add them to the folders that you already have created or you can create a new folder structure for emails that you have sent.

Split your Archived Email

Many email programs allow you to archive your email, and prompt you to do so every couple weeks. While archiving your email is a good thing, a little more thought needs to go into it. Should you just have one archive file for all emails you have ever received? Splitting your archive helps keep each archive file smaller and easier to manage. Again you need to think of what will you remember most when digging into those archived email. Breaking your emails into a couple smaller archived files can improve the performance of your email program. I split my archived email files into years, so every New Year I change my email program to save my archived email into a new file. I find myself rarely going back further than a year when looking for older emails.

Use a Rules Engine

If you find yourself moving similar emails to the same folder repetitively, you can set up a rule that will automatically move emails for you. The first couple rules you setup will feel clumsy, but the few seconds you save with each email processed by a rule will add up quickly! With many email programs you can usually right click on an email and you will be presented with an option of creating a rule based on that email.

Use Search

Organizing your emails into folders is a good start in being able to find a particular email. But even smaller folders can contain up to hundreds or even thousands of emails. Use your email program’s built in search to look for a particular email, it will be able to find it far faster than you browsing through emails individually.

Do you like to organize you email differently? What tips do you think you can offer that will help others?