Email Best Practices 2.0

Email newsletters seem easier but require an extra step

To subscribe to an email newsletter you just give them your email address and emails soon start arriving. However, unless you create an Outlook rule to redirect them to another folder, they will all arrive in your Inbox. Not good.

You don’t want less important email mixed in with your normal business email. It’s distracting and it makes your important business email much harder to find. Creating the Outlook rule to redirect it is easy but a nuisance (and can be problematic in Outlook if you have a lot of them).

RSS automatically puts your info aside for reading later

What is RSS? RSS is the industry-standard way to be notified of and receive new web content without having to manually check (for more info, do a web search on RSS).

The great thing about using the Outlook 2007 RSS feature is that your posts are all automatically delivered to a separate Outlook folder under RSS Feeds and outside your Inbox:

How to create RSS Feeds in Outlook

See Use Outlook as an RSS Reader from How-To Geek. The comments at the bottom of the How-To Geek article are helpful too.

Notes

• If you already have a workable way to automatically separate your email newsletters from your business mail, then this won’t add much value.

• Many sources (like this one – Email Best Practices 2.0) offer both RSS and email newsletter formats. Many sources may have just one.

• If you do a lot of reading (i.e., dozens of daily sources) you will prefer an RSS newsreader program like Google Reader. I use Feedly which is a nice-looking front-end to a not so pretty Google Reader. Newsreaders are highly configurable and designed for power reading.