Guide to Managing Small Business Email

Taming the electronic beast within your office
By Toni Klym McLellan

The Utopian promise of the paperless office brought along an ironic result: instead of shuffling papers, we now shuffle email messages. Stemming the tide of electronic interruptions can be daunting, especially as wireless "all in one" products emerge that allow 24/7 access to the office.

The benefits of learning to manage email messages include:

1. Increased productivity – the less "stuff" you have to shift around, the more time you have to concentrate on accomplishing key goals.
2. More efficiency – the more organized your email system, the faster you can find necessary items.
3. Stress reduction – never underestimate the relationship between stress management and productivity.
4. Skill building – learning to efficiently and intelligently manage one facet of your work bleeds over to other areas, such as voice mail and paper filing.

Action Steps

The best contacts and resources to help you get it done

Use a reliable service provider and streamline email accounts No matter how great a system you develop, it's useless if frequent outages prevent email access. Find a reliable internet service provider (ISP) with consistent tech support and streamline email addresses and monitoring.

I recommend: Consult ISP Rank, a directory that lets users find and compare ISPs. MailCOPA by InterVations offers software that locates and centralizes multiple email addresses into a single interface.

Choose the right software or interface for your business Email can be managed in ways ranging form simple Web-based inboxes to bundled software featuring calendar, time tracking, and messaging capabilities. What you use depends a lot on the nature of your business and your email load.

I recommend: Smaller enterprises will appreciate the free Web-based email at Yahoo! Mail (with business email upgrades), Google's Gmail, or Mozilla's Thunderbird. Microsoft offers web-based Office Outlook Live for an annual fee. Larger companies with multiple computers will benefit from bundled software like Microsoft Outlook via the Microsoft Office Small Business Edition or Qualcomm's Eudora.

Develop a system for managing and responding to messages Get to know your software or Web-based interface and take advantage of its features. Use email filtering and folder systems to file messages by client or project. Make sure you back up email messages regularly in the likely event of a system crash.

I recommend: Productivity blog 43folders offers systematic and action-oriented tips on managing email messages. Peruse the message boards at EmailDiscussions.com to see how others address common issues. Computer retailer CompUSA offers training courses, including one for Microsoft Outlook, and online training sites abound, like UniversalClass.com, which offers a course on Eudora software.

Decide if you need to archive email and, if so, develop a system Recent court cases have made email archiving mandatory for some regulated industries.

I recommend: Iron Mountain is one of the best-known companies to offer this service.

Tips & Tactics

Helpful advice for making the most of this Guide

• Email management does little good if you're vulnerable to computer viruses sent through attachments. Make sure your servers and computers are well-protected.
• Be sure to quickly scan the contents of your spam/junk folder before emptying to ensure that important messages didn't land there accidentally.
• Avoid the temptation to be too casual in email correspondence. Save the smiley faces and abbreviations for personal notes.
• To avoid attracting spam, never use your business address to make purchases; create a separate 'junk' address for this purpose.]
• Calendar weekly time to discard or archive what you no longer need.
• Throw off the yoke of instant gratification by turning off email notification and responding on your own timeline.
• Strengthen that pinkie by learning when to use that delete key.