You will receive many email messages every day. Some emails require your immediate attention. Other messages are just informative and sent cc. (carbon copy) or bcc. (blind carbon copy) to you. You should customize your email client in such a way that you can sift through them in no time.

Filtering

You can create a number of subfolders in your (local) inbox. By using adjustable filters, supplied by your email client, you can sort all incoming emails. A disadvantage associated with elaborate automatic filtering of incoming mail is that you have to check multiple inboxes to verify that you have new mail.

There are a number of repetitive email events you may want to filter out. If your group members email the whole group about their absence and presence in the next few days, ask them to put in the Subject-header a unique identifier. You can filter these mails immediately, using this identifier. If you are looking for some group member and you cannot find him, only then do you need to check the “Presence” inbox folder (or the online group calendar), to see if there is an email by this person, explaining why he is not in today.

Other emails you might want to filter are the ones of the type ‘email to all’.

Spam

Many educational institutions use standard open-source spam filters. The way these filters work is that they read all your email and they gauge their spam character by a number of criteria (an email containing

The spam rating will be put somewhere in the mail header (remember emails are in ASCII, so adding text is very simple). For instance a number of “*”, or a number of “s” is added, where the number is a measure for the degree of spam of the message.

Next you use the adjustable filters any decent email client offers. Tell the filter that email with a header containing at least “****” is to be classified as spam and have it dumped into some innocent folder. By allowing less or more “*” to pass, you can relax or tighten your filter. A good filter will only occasionally (one per day) let through spam and will hardly ever (in my case once per half year) erroneously classify a bona-fide email as spam.