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Idea of The Month Get The Most Out Of Mail Lists Overwhelmed by e-mails? Really want to read some but just can’t keep up with all of them? There are ways to manage your e-mail to cut through much of what you don’t want and use your time on the things you feel are important. No system is perfect and unless you read every piece of mail on every list, you will miss some things you would prefer to read. That is not possible for many people so organization, filtering and common sense will simplify things and lower the amount of time you need to spend going through your e-mail to find those gems you signed on for. The best place to start is to make sure you are on the lists that provide what you are looking for. The ROTI list has the most of everything. It has the most Rotary subject postings, but it also has the most banter, chitchat and jokes. There are many smaller lists and a couple in languages other than English. Take a look at http://roti.org/ to see all that is available. Next, work on cleaning up your own act before you decide that someone else should. Use subject lines on all of your messages. I mean subjects that place messages in a category where everyone can use filters to separate the messages by types. A pretty good guide to ROTI e-mail etiquette can be found at; http://www.rotary6950.org/roti/roticomm.htm If the proper subject lines are used it becomes easy to filter your e-mail to different folders, read the subjects you wish and delete the others in volume. Filter settings are usually easy to find on any program. Filters can be used to send certain subjects to any folder, including the deleted items folder. Use the help button if you can’t figure out how. Using a different e-mail address has been suggested as a way to keep your Rotary e-mail separate by ROTIan Alex Kho. In an e-mail, he writes I can understand the difficult in having to deal with 80-100 email messages a day! Specially when you use your office or personal email address in subscribing to the ROTI mailing list. What I did when I got into ROTI was to use an email address at Hotmail which I use exclusively for my Rotary. Even with it, the volume of traffic just too heavy, that I moved on to getting them on the web, then back to individual mails with filters, then on to getting the digest mode. Then there was this problem of Hotmail allowing me to keep only 2MB of messages. If I don't get to read the messages for a while, I could easily reach the limit. During the holidays last week, I started to look into what can be done. My solution was to use a web-based email with roti.every1.net which I constructed at everyone.net. It allows me 6MB of message storage! I use it exclusively for ROTI. I had folders like Banter, Others and Save. I had these filters: If Subject contains "banter" then deliver to Banter. If Subject contains "personal" then deliver to Banter. If Subject contains "welcome" then deliver to Others. If Subject contains "birthday" then deliver to Others. If Subject contains "nugget" then deliver to Others. I use the save folder for messages I need to save, just like yours. When I find time, I look into the Banter and Others folder and so on.. Try visiting http://roti.mail.everyone.net, get yourself a roti web-based email address and subscribe again to ROTI. The nice thing about it is that when you go to an external link, you wouldn't be under the cloud of everyone.net much unlike hotmail. I hope this can help to bring you back to the ROTI mailing list, like the others. Have a great Rotary day, To learn even more about how to configure the ROTI lists, visit http://www.groups@yahoo.com and spend a few minutes finding out things like how to go to no mail when you are going to be away from the computer for a few days, or how to read the messages on the web site instead of getting them in e-mail form. There is so much to be learned about Rotary or your fellow Rotarians from the ROTI lists that it is a shame to pass it all up when a little organization and planning makes it so easy to get just what you want. The key is that you have to do it. You can’t expect someone else to only send what you wish to read. |
