Not so long ago, you thought it was exciting to get any email. These days, the sheer volume is at best annoying and at worst a major problem. Email is supplanting the fax, the letter and even the phone for business and, increasingly, for personal communication. Even so, a good proportion of your incoming mail is likely to be junk and/or virus-carrying messages. Time to deal with it.

Basics

Develop a rhythm for your email. Get into the habit of checking and dealing with email at the same time and in the same way each day. You should check your mailbox in the morning before you get stuck into the working day. If you have an always-on connection, you probably deal with email as soon as it arrives.

The key question: "Is this a good use of my time?" How important is your mail traffic? Is an immediate reply really necessary? You should be able to respond within 24 hours, but find out what works for you - and for your business - and stick to that rhythm.

You don't always need to email. If you need a discussion, why send emails back and forth when one phone call could settle the matter?

Don't print out emails. It might be hard to break old habits, but it really shouldn't be necessary to print emails. Filing, retrieving and forwarding are all better done in your computer. About the only time you can justify a hard copy is when most of the other information relating to the project is on paper and needs to be filed together.

Processing mail

Don't open an email more than twice. Read each message once, then respond, file it, or delete it. It's all too easy to let mail moulder in your inbox; the only emails that should linger there are those that you haven't read yet or those that require some action from you (and make sure you do get round to dealing with them). Set a follow-up tag to mark emails that you want to come back to: in Outlook, right-click on the message and select Follow-Up; in Outlook Express, just click in the tag column next to the message.

Create folders for mail you must keep (separated into clients, projects, topics, whatever) and drag and drop emails there after you've read them. But don't create too many: when you need to find some filed message, you'll have too many places to look. And don't let the folders get too full: periodically go through them and winnow out anything you no longer need.

Lose the old news. Email newsletters can quickly clog up your inbox when you are too busy to read them. Be brutal: every few weeks, sort your messages by sender (click on the head of the "From" column) then look for clumps of unread newsletters. If you find more than two weeks' worth, it's time to unsubscribe. If you really must retain the newsletter, create a rule that automatically saves it to its own folder.

Use your alternative email addresses to distinguish different types of mail: personal vs business, general vs private, sales vs queries, and so on. Then you can set up rules that automatically put mail into a specific folder according to the recipient address. Most ISPs and company mail systems let you have more than one email address. The different addresses may be received via a single email account, but in any case it's easy enough to set your email software to handle more than one account. So your Inbox could feature mail addressed to a number of apparently different recipients.

Avoid the junk

Spam is a major irritant: it takes time to download, it fills up your inbox, it takes time to find out what's legitimate email and what isn't, and it's virtually unstoppable. There are a number of strategies that will slow down the flow and make it a bit easier to deal with, however.

For a start, if you have a website make sure all email references on it are encoded into a form that the spammer's address "harvesters" can't recognise. There are several ways of doing this; try www.emailaddresses.com/mailto_encoder.htm for one.

Some web-based email services (like Yahoo Mail and Hotmail) come with built-in spam filters. The filtering in Outlook versions up to XP is pretty ineffectual though. It works by comparing the text in incoming messages with a list of words in a file called filters.txt; if it finds a match, the message gets bounced into a Junk Mail folder. But Microsoft hasn't updated the word list in years, and Outlook's option for downloading updates simply doesn't work. You might as well switch on the junk mail filter - use Tools, Organize and select Junk E-Mail - but get into the habit of editing and adding to filters.txt (right-click a message, select Junk E-Mail to add the sender to the list).

Outlook 2003 is a great improvement: Click Tools, Options, Junk E-Mail and choose "low" or "high" filtering.

It makes sense to cover your options by downloading one of the many anti-spam tools: see the Resources box.

You can also set up some rules of your own. Look for the kind of phrases that occur in spam: get-rich-quick schemes, grandiose promises of sexual potency, various drugs. You can set the filter to direct dodgy messages to Deleted Items, or (more usefully) to a separate "Possible Spam" folder which will let you check a suspicious email at your leisure.

Never follow "unsubscribe" instructions at the bottom of spam emails. These are used solely to confirm your email address actually exists and is available to receive more spam.

Resources

Tips'n'tweaks

Attachment Options
www.slovaktech.com/attachmentoptions.htm

Microsoft prevents you from attaching certain types of file to messages. This free add-in lets you decide which attachments are more (or less) dangerous.

Outlook Contacts Scrubber
www.teamscope.com/otherpro/freeutil.asp#scrubber

A free way to cut out duplicates from your Outlook Contacts.

Anti-spam

SpamBayes
spambayes.sourceforge.net

Effective add-in for Outlook 2000 and XP that is "trained" by you to recognise email. Free.

Spamcop
www.spamcop.net

Free notification service - you forward spam email to Spamcop to blacklist the sender and complain to the ISP.

SpamNet
www.spamnet.com

Free collaborative system: use the current filter list to weed out spam, click the "block" button to notify the whole system when you find a spam message that has slipped through.

SpamPal
www.spampal.com

Checks incoming email against one or more lists of known spam mailers (you choose how many of these to use - more means safer but slower). Free.

Free anti-virus

I know of four totally free antivirus programs for Windows. All of them are well-regarded and highly effective, with regular updates of virus definitions, but these two include email scanning options as well as the usual disk and memory scanners.

Avast 4 Home Edition
www.asw.cz/i_idt_153.html

AVG Anti-Virus System
www.grisoft.com