Git a minute: organize your email, the easy way

Get a lot of email?  Sometimes it hard to keep the inbox from growing.  It's tempting to go through it as quickly as possible, skimming the important stuff, saving some for later and deleting the rest.

Those last two things (saving and deleting) offer you some opportunities to get control of your inbox, rather than just getting through it. And if you do it strategically, you can do in in a minute, literally.

Each time you clear your inbox, take a minute to set up a filter that handles the saving or deleting of one message.

Here's an example: the online statement from your gas company, an investment account, or your mortgage.  If you use Gmail (or another web mail service) you can click:

More actions > Filter messages like these

And then set some rules for handling the message, like storing it for the day you pay bills, permanently storing it (if it's on autopay), or starring it so it's an obvious priority when the next one comes in.

You can do that in 60 seconds.

With some creative use of the filtering rules, you can be amazingly precise in what you do with what message, like highlighting a bill you have to pay, but saving or deleting the company's newsletter, even if they come from the same email address.  You can learn some tips and tricks here.

If you get Facebook alerts, you can star responses to things you've posted, save for later other messages and delete the list of birthdays.

If you commit to permanently handling one message each time you read email, in a week you'll notice how much faster you can get through your inbox.

Setting mailto: in Chrome and Ubuntu

I must have had an extension that made Gmail the mailto: app in Chrome. Mailto: is what automatically opens up a new email message when you click on an email address, helpfully inserting the address as the recipient.  After cleaning out some extensions I didn't think I used, mailto: stopped working.

No problem. Ubuntu has a convenient way to make mailto: work. It's called Desktop Webmail.

Applications > Internet > Desktop Webmail

That gets you a dropdown menu from which you can pick the webmail you use, like Gmail, Yahoo, etc.

Check Gmail (or whichever service you use) and clicking on an email link will open your mail service to a new message addressed to the address you clicked.

I'd show you a picture of the dropdown menu, but I can't. Below the dropdown menu there was a cryptic checkbox labelled simply "Ask again." I didn't know what it meant, but assumed it had something to do with asking which webmail service I wanted to use each time I clicked on an email address. I unchecked the box.

Now when I go to Applications > Internet > Desktop Webmail it opens Gmail instead of opening the menu. Apparently "Ask again" meant giving me the option of changing my default webmail service. Oh well.

Incidentally, if you don't see Desktop Webmail among your applications, you can install it from the repository or with:

sudo apt-get install desktop-webmail

Inbox growing? Delegate to an always-available, eager-to-help assistant

In just a few minutes you can stop being a slave to your inbox and make you inbox a slave to you.  All you have to do is delegate

In this case, you're delegating to Gmail (or whatever email service you use).

If that sounds odd, consider this:  Gmail is eager to help, it's always available and, with it's easy-to-use and precise filtering rules, amazing nimble and judicious.

Here's an example of what I mean:  Let's say you have an investment account and it sends you regular messages.   Every day you get a closing summary, once a month or once a quarter you get a full report on your portfolio, you get announcements about annual meetings of companies whose stock you own, and somewhat regularly you get what amount to sales pitches. And they all come from the same email address.

Gmail can handle that just like you do.

Assume they all come from Investment Alert.  The subject lines each identify the contents of the message:

• your eStatement
• Closing Summary
• Annual Meeting
• deposit to investment account
• Annual Report

With rules, you can handle each of those messages in a different way.  Here's how.

Open an eStatement. Click:

More Actions > Filter messages like these

The From: box should already have in it the sender -- your investment company.  Two boxes below that you'll see Subject:

type eStatement

then click

Test Search

This is important.  It helps you make sure your criteria are catching all of the messages you're trying to filter and, possibly more important, none of the message you don't want to filter.  Just review the list of messages that show up to make sure they're all what you want.

Then click:

Next Step

Here you decide what to do with these messages.  I don't read the eStatements as they come in, but I like to review them if I get a chance.  As a result, I want them out of my inbox, labelled "investments" and marked as read (so they don't add to my already depressing unread count.  To do that, use these options:

check "Skip the Inbox (Archive it) 

check "Mark as read" 

check "Apply the label: and select "investments" from the drop-down menu (or select "New label" and create it) 

If you have a few of these messages in your inbox, they should be listed below the filter.  To handle all of them:

check "Also apply filter to x conversations below"

Finally, click

Create Filter

Have two investment accounts (or whatever kind of message you're filtering)?  Apply the same filter to both.  In the From: box:

• parenthesis around the from address
• add a space
• type OR (all caps)
• add a space
• type the second from address in perenthesis

The From: box should look like this: (senderone@email.com) OR (sendertwo@smail.com).

Now the filter will handle email from both senders.