How much time do you spend sifting through your inbox? If there are days it seems that the email is endless, that’s because it is. According to Microsoft, a typical email user received a total of 14,235 emails in 2011. That’s a lot of email but not the kind of email you always want. Newsletters, daily deals, social updates, shopping offers, and other things we sign up for, now called graymail, comprises almost 80% of our email. With so much graymail coming in, a lot of time is spent sifting through it to find the important stuff.
Looking at my inbox, I know I spend way too much time sifting, sorting, and deleting graymail even with an already organized system in place. To manage the hundreds of emails I receive each day, I rely on an email program that aggregates my mail from 7 different accounts, including dedicated email addresses for my site, personal, and daily deals and social network updates. Mail coming to each distinct account is assigned a specific color so I should be able to scan for what I’m looking for easily and quickly however, this isn’t always the case. Graymail still lives within separate folders for each of my inboxes.
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| Number of emails that I typically get each hour during the work day. Notice the color coding? That’s how I sift through them but it’s still time consuming! |
Every day there are new newsletters to sign up for that offer enticing offers that I sometimes unsubscribe to. Then there are the social networking tools that automatically inform me of my friend’s behaviors through my inbox. Not to mention the Pinterest followers, Twitter direct messages, and LinkedIn requests. As you can see, the amount of email is never going to decrease. It will only increase. ACK!
Is it even possible to get a grip on the staggering amount of graymail? Yes.
I could turn off my alerts but then I risk missing something whether it’s a fantastic one day only shopping deal on a favorite designer’s goods or earth shattering news about a friend. Now thanks to Hotmail, I don’t have to miss a thing. Hotmail has developed tools to conquer graymail for more efficient email reading.
If you’ve never had a Hotmail account and want to stop reading now, don’t! Hotmail can be used to aggregate your existing accounts and will serve as your new mail email for seamless integration so you don’t have to waste additional time notifying friends of your new email address. Because honestly, no one has time for that!
Once you have a Hotmail account, you can manage your inbox in very little time. Take a look!
The new Hotmail has many features to minimize overall time managing email. Instead of searching through tons of messages and deleting each one individually, I can Sweep and Schedule Cleanup. The Sweep allows me to file emails to a folder based on the sender’s email. I can set up rules so all of my social media alerts from Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. go to a single folder. Daily deals can also have their own folder so offerings from Groupon, Living Social, Zulily, Totsy, and more go in another one.
I also like that I can also automate my inbox to help me manage all those unwanted newsletters. One I unsubscribe, Hotmail does the rest by automatically removing any mail from that sender and placing it into my junk mail so I never have to see it again.
After Sweeping daily deal emails into a folder, I can Schedule Cleanup to rid my inbox of daily deal alerts that automatically gets rid of all but the most recent deal. I’ll never have to read about what I missed during the previous days because Hotmail will automatically delete it for me. After all, who really wants to know what they missed out on from days before?
Other great features that I’m enjoying include:
- Establishing categories to find important emails faster by filtering them directly into their own folders.
- Flagging important messages to appear at the top of my inbox until I unflag them.
Learn about smart tools from Hotmail to manage your inbox automatically and conquer graymail.
This post was written as part of a sponsored campaign with Hotmail and Technorati. All opinions are my own.
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Original post by Tech Savvy Mama
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Very interesting. I’m struggling with multiple e-mail accounts…might need to consider hotmail!
I’ve been using Hotmail for YEARS. Almost 15. It may not be the coolest email platform, but I love how easy it is to use, to maneuver, and to sort my emails. I have a bunch of other emails and I forward them all to my Hotmail inbox and do my work from there. I’ll have to look at all these features more closely!
really??! I used Hotmail years ago, then left. . . but now I may come on back to the hotmail side!