By Herman Drost
Do you often get bogged down with too
much email to handle, chewing up your valuable time
online? With email being one of the most popular forms
of online marketing you can be sure you are going
to receive much more email in the future, wanted and
unwanted. Picture this scenario:
You receive 40 new emails in your inbox
each day:
1. 10 are from personal friends.
2. 10 are requests for more information from potential
clients.
3. 10 are new newsletters that must be read.
4. 10 are junk mail
So how do you deal with it?
1. Create different email addresses using domain forwarding.
If you have your own web site, your web host allows
you to forward all your email from your domain (domain
forwarding) to an outside address (ie james@aol.com).
This is called your "catch all" address ie set up
your email aliases (info@yourdomain.com, sales@yourdomain.com
etc) so when you receive email from any of these,
they will be forwarded to your "catch all" address.
The limitation of this method is that you can't send
email from your alias addresses. It can only be sent
form your "catch all" email address.
2. Set-up separate email accounts. To
also send mail from each new email address, you need
to set up a separate email account for each address.
Usually your web host will give you a number of free
email (called POP3) accounts that come with your hosting
package. Create a new email account for different
categories ie firstname@yourdomain.com - for emailing
your personal friends. newsletters@yourdomain.com
- for subscribing to newsletters. articles@yourdomain.com
- for submitting articles. ads@yourdomain.com - for
advertising information ads1@yourdomain.com - a public
email address you use for forums, newsgroups and SPAM.
If the spam gets too much you can dispose of this
address and set-up a new one.
3. Create new inboxes for each of these
separate email accounts. Set-up your corresponding
email accounts (as above) in your email software (ie
outlook express, eudora etc). You will need this information:
incoming mail (POP3) = mail.yourdomain.com - incoming
mail server (SMTP) = mail.yourdomain.com or your ISPs
- outgoing mail server. account name = newsletters@yourdomain.com
password = the password you select Do this for each
of each of your email accounts.
4. Create folders and subfolders in
your inbox. ie newsletters - marketing tips newsletter
- web design newsletter - forum newsletter This allows
you to immediately categorize your incoming email
by dragging and dropping it into each of these subfolders.
Now you know instantly where to retrieve your past
correspondence.
5. Set-up filters (message rules) for
receiving different emails. Most email clients have
filters or message rules you can set-up to filter
your incoming email. For example to make sure you
don't ever receive emails from a specific email address
again, you can block the sender. To do this in outlook
express, highlight the email address you received,
go to message - block sender. That's it! For a more
extensive tutorial on setting up extensive message
rules in outlook express, go to: http://familyinternet.about.com/library/weekly/aa020603a.htm
6. Periodically delete your received
email. Soon you will get into the habit of automatically
hitting the delete button as you recognize email that
is obviously spam. This means your inbox will fill
up very quickly with deleted email and will slow down
your email software. Therefore clean out your inbox
at the end of every day. In Part 2 of this article,
I'll go more deeply into how you can effectively deal
with spam. This will help you to be more organized,
save time, frustration and enable you to be more efficient
in your online marketing adventures.
About the author:
Herman Drost is the author of the NEW ebook "101 Highly
Effective Strategies to Promote Your Web Site" a powerful
guide for attracting 1000s of visitors to your web
site. http://www.isitebuild.com/web-site-promotion
Subscribe to his “Marketing Tips” newsletter for more
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