River of Emails

When you embark on something like author publicity, you open yourself up to floods of emails. There isn’t really any way to avoid it if you don’t want to work part time unsubscribing from mailing lists. What do you do about it?

I feel like I have a pretty good handle on it so I’ll tell you what I do.

I have lots of separate email addresses. This seems like it would cause more email confusion, but I use each like a seperate inbox just for one kind of communication. I have an email address for personal use that I only share with family and close friends. I have a “commercial” email address for all my web commerce not connected with my author endeavors. I have a “security” email address for account alerts. I have my author email address for just author business. And I have a private notes email address that I use exclusively to send notes via text and email to myself.
I make lots of folders for everything so I can find things I’m looking for right away. Each email address has its own sub-folders. The most useful is the “services” folder for all the ads everybody sends like mad. I also sometimes name it “commercial”. I usually skim those for any useful stuff and then mark it all “read”. Here is a picture of the folders I’ve created for my author email address:
I use Outlook’s rules to sort my mail into folders. You sort them into the folders using Outlook’s rules, found by right-clicking on the email you want to sort. Outlook can then sort all the emails in the folder and each future incoming email. (I sort emails at the inbox but I showed the picture in the “Services” folder so you can’t see all my secrets.)

Checking my email on my phone ruins my sorting, but I can fix this by opening the “Manage Rules & Alerts….” option and choosing the “run rules now” option.