3 Tools to Control Your Email Before It Controls You

According to a survey by Osterman Research, the typical worker in a large organization sends or receives 108 emails per day.  If that worker spends about 2 minutes on each email, he is spending 3.6 hours per day on email!  In addition, spam accounts for 20% of all email traffic (National Office for Information Economy).  Add to this any low-value or non-urgent subscription emails we receive, and we find ourselves spending too much time managing email information that is not relevant to our vision, goals and daily work.  Most email programs allow for creation of filters and rules to assist with incoming email management, and you can always unsubscribe from email lists one by one.  But, have you considered letting a program or service do this for you?

Following are some tools for reducing the amount of email you need to manage each day.

1. Unroll.me is a free application that works with Gmail and Google Apps.  It will remove you from unwanted subscription lists and roll up the rest in an organized overview.  The Rollup offers a daily summary of your subscriptions and organizes and prioritizes each email into its own individual Rollup category as it comes in.

2. OtherInbox provides a similar function as Unroll.me with an application called Unsubscriber, but Unsubscriber works not only with GMail, but also with Aol and Yahoo.  OtherInbox also provides an Organizer function like Rollup and a Message Finder for the iPhone.

3. Sanebox uses an algorithm to determine the importance of emails on the basis of your past interaction with senders. It will move unimportant messages out of the Inbox into a separate folder, and summarize them for you. Although this can all happen automatically, you can manually create new rules just by moving messages that that SaneBox has positioned on your behalf. The service works with any email application, including Outlook.  An additional feature for Dropbox users is that Sanebox will strip file attachments from your email, put them in Dropbox and add a link to the file.  SaneBox offers a one-month free trial.  Then, it ranges from $2/month and up.

I would love to hear of other apps or services you use to control your incoming email.  And, I’d love to hear if you try one of these out.  Join the conversation on our Facebook page.