Dear Inbox Overloaded,

You are not alone! E-mail is  a critical tool that we all rely on to be reachable by partners, supporters, colleagues, friends and family. Unfortunately, the more we use it the more mail we get - and the more unmanageable it seems to become. Have no fear! One great way to grapple with overloaded inboxes is to set up and use Mailbox Folders. Read on to get to know the folders in your e-mail system, and how you can use folders to organize your e-mail.

Know your folders!

E-mail folders can help you organize your messages. Next time you log into Kabissa Webmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook or whatever e-mail system you use, look for folders and click on their names to access the messages stored within them. You probably have seen some or all of these special folders already:

• Inbox: This is where new incoming messages addressed to you will be delivered
• Drafts: This folder is where you can store messages you have started, but not yet sent. You can access these messages at a later time to revise and send them.√Ǭ†
• Sent: When you write a message, you have an option to save the message in your own mailbox. Once your message is sent, as you might guess, a copy will be saved in the Sent folder.√Ǭ†
• Trash: Messages that you have marked for deletion are stored here until you choose to delete them personally.
• Spam/Bulk: Increasingly, e-mail systems move incoming mail that is suspected to be spam or bulk mail to a special folder. This helps to avoid distraction since it spares you from looking at mail that is not addressed specifically to you and might be unwanted advertising (spam) - but be sure to check it because the detection is not perfect and it might not all be spam!

Knowing what you can expect to find in these standard folders will already be a great help in figuring out how to make the most of your e-mail.

Organize your Messages

If you are feeling overloaded by the contents of your inbox, then consider creating additional folders (and sub-folders even) to organize your e-mail according to your personal needs, much like you probably already organize your documents on your computer. You can then move messages into various folders, and then refer back to them later by looking in the folders.

Avoid creating too many folders, however - to stay organized, think about the types of messages you receive daily and write down a short list of categories. For example, you might want to create a folder for newsletters you receive (like Kabissa Gong Gong!) to separate them from your other correspondence and save them for future reference. You might also want to create folders to store personal and professional messages once you have dealt with them. You might have a specific project or activity that you correspond frequently about that would warrant having its own folder.

If you do alot of correspondence for your organization on a range of topics, you may want to consider setting up a more organized folder structure. For example, we at Kabissa have a hierarchy of eight folders and subfolders which we try to stick to for everything we do, including our shared file server, timesheets and of course e-mail folders. It works great for us!

Technically the steps for creating new folders are simple - to start, look on the menu on your e-mail system for an option such as "create folder" or "add folder". Click on the option. You will be prompted to type in the name for the folder.

Use Keyword Searches

OK, this is all well and good, but you still have 4689 messages in your inbox. Make that 4691, 4695, 4705... Help!

Don't panic. To deal with the existing messages, first of all take a look at the Search function in your e-mail system. Much like a Google Internet search, you can type in keywords such as the name of a correspondent and pull up a list of messages that contain your keywords. You can then select the results (usually it is possible to select a screenful of results at once) and then move them all at once into one of your new folders.

Repeat the above steps using keywords reflecting the various types of correspondence you typically receive until you have dealt with all the essential messages existing in your inbox. The remaining 200 or so you can then go through screen by screen and delete (because you haven't even read it) or move to another folder.

Power Users: Set up filters!

Power Users might at this stage want to take advantage of their newfound knowledge about the types of correspondence they send and receive and set up "filters" to automatically move messages that arrive in their inbox to other folders based on keywords or other criteria. Look for this feature in your e-mail settings. Be careful of this feature, however, since it sometimes moves messages out of sight that otherwise you might read.