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Best of ABA TECHSHOW – The Inbox Ninjas: Helping You Chop Through Your E-Mail Inbox

By Xavier Beauchamp-Tremblay and Barron K. Henley

Desperate about the 20,000 unsorted e-mails in your inbox? Remain calm, and you too can master your inbox and regain control over the chaos.

This "Best of ABA TECHSHOW^®" article was originally presented at ABA TECHSHOW 2010, the World's Premier Legal Technology Conference and Expo. It's just one example of the terrific content offered at ABA TECHSHOW by more than 50 legal technology experts. ABA TECHSHOW 2011 will be held April 11-13, 2011, at the Hilton Chicago. Get registration and other information at www.techshow.com.

I. Problems With Email:

1. Too many Interruptions: Most lawyers receive 100+ emails per day which means that we're receiving an email every 4.8 minutes in an 8 hour day. The impact of this: 28% of a day spent dealing with unnecessary interruption.
2. Email Storage: What do we do with all of this email? There are several problems related to this:
   1. Disorganization: Most people have hundreds or thousands of unrelated messages in their inboxes. This is equivalent to taking all of the paper out of your files and throwing it on the floor of the file room. The point is, if it's not organized, then it's mostly useless.
   2. Storage Space Limitations: You may have been scolded by your IT folks about this. If you're using Microsoft Exchange on your server, then it can get overloaded with the quantity of emails and attachments you keep in your inbox and Outlook folder structures. If you don't have Exchange, then all of those emails (and contacts, and appointments and tasks) are stored in a PST file (Outlook database) on your hard drive or the server. The bigger that database, the slower your computer will run. Of course, the database can also over-run your storage capacity.
   3. No One Else Can See Your Email But You: In most cases, if you have an important client communication in Outlook, no one else in your office can see it. In many cases, lawyers want to share this information, but don't know how to do it.
   4. Difficulties Searching: Many people complain that it's nearly impossible to efficiently search old emails for a particular conversation. What can you do to make this task easier?
   5. Printing Email Just Makes Paper Files More Unwieldy: How can you share case-related email with others in the firm aside from printing it and putting it in the paper file (which is utterly useless)?
3. Too Much Legitimate Email To Deal With Effectively: Many people simply receive more email than they can read and keep up with. How do you respond, take action, sort, store and track all of this email?
4. No Expectation of Privacy: The old saying goes: You should never send an email that would embarrass you were it to appear on the front page of tomorrow's paper. Is there anything you can do to create an expectation of privacy?
5. Too Much Spam Getting Through: There are lots of ways to avoid SPAM, and yet it still manages to get into our mailboxes. What can you do about it?
6. You're Not Using Outlook Effectively: Although millions of people use Outlook, most do not use all of its functionality to their advantage. In this seminar, we'll give you some great tips for making better use of Outlook.

II. Organize Outlook:

1. How To Set Up A New Email Folder: To Setup a new Subfolder in your Inbox, right-click the Inbox (or your mailbox).New Folder. Give it a name and make sure it will contain Mail and Post Items. Then click OK.
2. Two Folders Everyone Should Have: Outlook tools such as Rules and Alerts and add-ons may help you manage your inbox, but they need to be coupled with the right folders in order to be truly effective. These two folders can bring you a long way in helping you sort automatically a great amount of your emails:
   1. "Non-urgent”: Where non urgent communications such as general announcements inside your organization or newsletters should be automatically sorted in this folder by an Outlook rule.
   2. “Buffer”: A buffer zone between your inbox and the trash, to keep your inbox clean from emails that you know you will eventually delete, but that you’re scared of sending to trash too soon. This is where you would sort the conversation-like threads that don’t need to be archived in the long term. This folder is especially useful when using these Outlook add-ons that can sort both outgoing and incoming mail when replying.

III. Outlook Rules and Alerts:

1. Outlook Rules: Rules allow you to auto-sort incoming email (among other things). Here's how you set one up:
   1. Click the Tools menu. Rules and Alerts.
   2. Click the New Rule button.
   3. Select Start from blank rule if you’re using Outlook 2003 or prior. If you’re using Outlook 2007, then choose the appropriate item from the list below:
   4. Follow the steps for selecting the Condition, Action, Exceptions, then give it a name and make sure the rule is turned on!
   5. Rules on the fly: You can also create a rule by right-clicking on an email and selecting Create rule. For example, if an email you just received from a newsletter has just buried an important email out of your sight, you may instantly create a rule that will, in the future, automatically redirect an email from this newsletter in your “Non Urgent” folder.
2. Rule To Delay Sent Mail By One Minute (in case you change your mind):
   1. In Outlook, click on the Tools menu. Rules and Alerts. New Rule button.
   2. Under "Start from a blank rule," choose "check messages after sending."
   3. On the next screen ("which conditions do you want to check"), don't check anything (you want this rule to apply to every email you send) and click the Next button at the bottom. You'll see the following dialog (click Yes):
   4. In the next screen, check "defer delivery by a number of minutes," and then click the hyperlink for "a number of" at the bottom of the screen and enter the number of minutes you want to delay your email.
   5. Click Next and add any exceptions (for people you don't want to delay email to).
   6. Click Next, name your rule Delay and click Finish.
3. Rule To Keep Track of Delegated Email: Many people forward email to others to deal with but have a difficult time remembering what they delegated for follow up purposes. Here's a rule that will help.
   1. First, create a folder in Outlook called Delegated Email.
   2. In Outlook, click on the Tools menu. Rules and Alerts. New Rule button
   3. Under "start from a blank rule," choose "check messages when they arrive" and click Next at the bottom of the dialog.
   4. Under "check which conditions do you want to check," check BOTH "from people or distribution list" and "where my name is in the CC box." At the bottom of the dialog, click the hyperlink for "people or distribution list" and add your email address. We're basically creating a rule that will look for emails from you and copied to you. Click Next.
   5. Under "what do you want to do with the message," choose "move it to the specified folder." Make the specified folder your Delegated Mail folder. Click Next and add any exceptions. Click Next, name it and click Finish.

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¹ See Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast, The New York Times, June 14, 2008, http://tinyurl.com/y9vxuvk.