GMail advanced search

GMail supports a set of advanced operators to make specific searches.
A useful example is the before operator:

before:2011/12/31

Type the above in GMail's search box and it will search for all messages dated before December 31st 2011.

You can find the other operators in Using advanced search reference.

Taking Email Etiquette to the Next Level

When working with others in the office, most know it is better to approach a colleague who is relaxed and drinking a cup of coffee versus a frazzled co-worker buried under a pile of paperwork.

Unfortunately, email doesn’t offer users the same social cues – until now.

Georgia Tech Assistant Professor of Computing Eric Gilbert has developed software called courteous.ly, a service that shows current user email loads in real-time.

“I think we’re really good at the etiquette part when we have the cues that allow us to be polite,” said Gilbert, a faculty member in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing. “Courteous.ly helps manage expectations and lets people choose to send mail when it’s best for you.”

Available for download, courteous.ly currently works with Google-based email, such as Gmail, which is used by 160 million people worldwide. Roughly 3 million businesses also use Google-hosted mail. Signing up for courteous.ly is as easy as entering your email address and verifying a few links.

Source: Georgia Tech via ACM Tech News

Inboxing

I'm not the first to come up with it (see urban dictionary) but I'd like to propose the word Inboxing.

An inbox is a container in which all the papers to be dealt with are put. Or, figuratively, it is the aggregate of items that demand one's attention or effort.

Boxing, of course, is a combat sport where two participants, generally of similar weight, fight each other with their fists.

Inboxing is the fight you have to go through every day to clean all the items that find their way to your inbox: emails, chats, feeds, papers, etc.
It's worth fighting to claim back your time to think and be creative!


Good luck! Unlike boxing, in inboxing the two participants don't have similar weight :-)

How to quickly clean old GMails

Do a search for "before:2009/01/01", then select all results, and delete.
The deleted messages will be kept in the trash for 30 days. After that, they are deleted and the storage space is reclaimed.

Source: Web Worker Daily

Email communication breakdown?

Communication breakdown,
It's always the same,
I'm having a nervous breakdown,
Drive me insane!

in "Communication Breakdown" by Led Zeppelin



Do you get this feeling when you're handling your email? I know I did.

Then I decided to change the way I worked with email using a Google-inspired approach: "archive and use search instead of spending a lot of time storing the messages meticulously in specific folders".

My current email folders are the following:
Inbox
My Mail
Mailing Lists

That's right! Just three!
'Inbox' has the new arrivals that I haven't read or handled yet. 'My Mail' holds all my messages. 'Mailing Lists' holds messages not specifically for me but that I'm interested in keeping. Mail can be directly stowed in Mailing Lists using filters.

When you want to look up a specific mail message, just use your program's search capabilities to retrieve it quickly! (e.g. Thunderbird's search capabilities are very good).

But doesn't this mean that the 'My Mail' and 'Mailing Lists' keep growing indefinitely? Yes, it does. This is why we need one more time: archives.

My archives folders look like this:

Archives
|-My Mail Archive
|-2005
|-2006
|-2007
|-Mailing Lists Archive
|-2005
|-2006
|-2007

Archiving is easy and is done once a year.

For me this email scheme works great. Do you want to give it a try?