Email is a great tool. Unfortunately, its easy to think of it as a Swiss Army Knife and use it ways it’s not well suited. Here are a few tips to help you get a handle on email:

1. Your inbox is not permanent storage. Work through it and take action:
1. File, Flag for follow-up, reply or delete.
2. Use folders for longer term storage and getting organized. Some good examples of useful folders might be:
1. Follow-up – Items that need research before replying.
2. Read Later – News letters or messages that don’t require a response.
3. Archive – Longer term storage.
4. Projects
3. Turn off Email alerts and only check email periodically through the day.
4. Use the tools offered by most of email applications like flags,labels,stars to make it easier to keep track of messages.
5. If you are out of office, make sure you use the auto-responder feature to make sure people understand it might be a while before you respond.
6. Make sure understand your Anti spam software and Junk Mail options so it doesn’t block your important emails and try to check spam folder at regularly.

For a more comprehensive list of ideas for getting email under control check out InboxZero.

If you missed the keynote this morning for the Windows 7 launch in NYC you can catch it here. There are great demos of features in the latest version of Windows along with some fantastic new hardware. Check it out!

Email, a great tool but, sometimes it  a real time killer. One fantastic tool that has helped me better manage email is Xobni.  It’s an add-on for Outlook 2003 and 2007 and the latest version, 1.8, adds some great new features. Here are a few of my favorites:

Search

Xobni indexes all of your email for super fast, ‘as you type’ searches. You can put in all kinds of keywords, names or even partial phone numbers. Xobni breaks email into more that just messages, it also manages your connections. A simple search for “‘Bob”, (because you  have forgotten that potential new clients last name) returns a list of every “Bob” you have ever had an email conversation with and every message where ‘Bob’ is referenced. Now, you can be quickly reminded of “Bobs” last name, click on him and see all the messages you have exchanged.

Conversations

Xobni groups all of those threaded conversations together so you can quickly find the parts that matter most to you without having to track back through each message one at a time. Xobni also relates all of the people you have been talking to by analyzing the To, From, and CC lines to make connections with people you may not have seen before.

File Attachments

Finding that report from last week or last quarter can really be difficult. Xobni has a special section for files. If you can find “Bob”, you’ll see a list of every file you and “Bob” have ever exchanged.

If you live in your Outlook inbox, you should try Xobni.