EMAIL, What To Do With It

Email is wonderful? We receive it every day. Some email is junk, some is Spam of offers from someone to buy his or her product that we did not request. Some email is news from family, friends, or work acquaintances.

A lot of people I have met over the years, believe that mailbox is endless and will store all the email they want to keep. A lot of people will create mailboxes to store their mail in and just keep adding mail to them as they receive it. I do not know what the size limit is or the total pieces of mail it will hold. BUT there is a limit! When that limit is reached, your system becomes trash!

Trash, that was harsh. That is exactly what has happened to the systems I have seen when their mail programs (Outlook Express or Outlook) mail box become full and beyond the design of the software. Not only does the mail program crash and burn but it has taken the operating system with it!

How can you prevent this from happening? EASY. Treat your email as you would your snail mail. How long do you keep your snail mail? What do you do with snail mail you want to keep?

Simple questions with simple answers. Most of us look at where the mail came from and those that are junk, we toss into the wastebasket. The mail we get from people we know we read. We will also look at the mails we receive that are bills. Sometimes, we will look at the sales flyers we get and then toss them. We keep very little mail.

Usually when we do, it is because we have requested written information from someone that we will put into a drawer for safe keeping with all our other papers. Most people will not keep snail mail on file unless it has something to do with their business or an ongoing dispute with someone they have purchased from. Our private letters may be retained but usually they are discarded after we reply to them.

Do the same with your email! Go ahead and have your different mailboxes to sort your mail. Trash your junk mail and mail from unknown senders immediately. Answer any email that you want to respond to and then get rid of what came to you. If you have email you want to save permanently, do so. But save it as a ".txt" file somewhere else on your hard drive. Do not save it as an email file on the same hard disk partition as the operating system. If you have only one partition, save it to a floppy disk.

In saving your email in this manner, you will be able to read the information without having to open your email program or have the operating system working. If you have a "boot disk" that will start your computer to a command prompt (C>:) then you can read anything you have saved as a ".txt" file. You will also be able to read any files saved as a ".doc" file.

While we are talking about email, ensure that you have the "preview pane" turned OFF! Most mail viruses will begin working when the mail is opened. By having the preview pane turned on, when you highlight the email, some lines are visible. The email has been opened by the system and any viruses that were present, are now working! Oops.

A good anti virus package should ALWAYS be installed and operating any time you are online or reading email. Ensure that you keep whatever anti virus program you use, up-to-date!

I hope that you find the thoughts and comments above have given you some ideas on how to better manage your email. By nature, we are all collectors of all things we do not need or use. Our computer systems make collecting and saving extremely easy to do with the email we receive. No one likes lost email or having to restore an operating system that has crashed. If you really want to save an email, save it as a .txt file somewhere else on your system and then delete it from your email program.