Is Your Email Dragging Your Performance Down?

Written by Zac Johnson
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Yesterday John made a post asking “How Much Spam Do You Get Per Day?“. John also posted a picture of his Gmail account, which showed 1,022 spam emails within a twenty four hour period. It’s funny that John wrote the post, because I’ve been meaning to write something like this as well, as I’ve noticed quite a large number in my Gmail account for the spam folder.

I really like the Gmail interface and how easy it is to search out emails, and it’s really great because you don’t have to worry about data storage since Google provides an always growing amount. So as of now, my Gmail spam folder currently has 177,576 emails over the past thirty days. Another nice feature of Gmail, is that they automatically delete spam email once it has been around for 30 days. This works out to around 5,919 spam emails receive a day… or nearly 1 every 4 mins. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even bother looking through my spam folder. I had a spam filter placed on my servers, but it was actually causing more problems than helping. Gmail has been doing a better job sorting through the spam and has a good idea of what to sort out and what not. It hasn’t been a problem, but if someone can’t get me by email they can always use my blog contact form, AIM or my cell.

Not only do I have a massive amount of email in my spam folder, but I have over 12,000 unread messages in my INBOX as well! The majority of these are emails I wanted to check and didn’t get a chance to… and any crap mail I simply missed deleting. I always read and try to reply to all of my blog email. If you’ve sent an email in the past and haven’t received a response, don’t take it personal… I either meant to reply earlier and the delay had it pushed down in the pile or it was overlooked somehow.

I’ve been using Gmail almost since it first came out. Compared to when I was using Microsoft Outlook, my overall experience is phenomenally better. What type of email provider are you using, and how much time is spent during your day checking and replying to your email? You’d be surprised how fast the time builds up and how much of a distraction it can be!

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15 Replies to “Is Your Email Dragging Your Performance Down?”

  2. Email is definately one of the biggest time wasters around… Although I don't get nearly that kind of volume of spam messages!

  3. Never saw that huge number of spam in any gmail accounts dude!

    But anyways yea, automatic spam mail deletion by google is a good feature, or we should have died deleting those manually.

  4. Wow! I thought I was starting to get a lot of email now but my numbers are no where near that at all! Thankfully I'm still keeping on top of my inbox but it does take some time. I actually have a bigger problem with comment spam than email spam.

  5. I love Gmail, it catches all my spam and there are very few false positives so I don't check the spam folder either.

    Lately I've been cutting down on my email volume and I've seen a great productivity increase 😀

  6. I use Gmail as well, and love it. It works a lot better than anything I've ever used. The only issue I have is that if I delete certain items in my inbox repeatedly without reading them…I'll find these emails in my spam folder. I've just learned to open them first before deleting them if I want to keep receiving email from that person!

    If I start getting a lot of spam in my folder, I look through and try to find similarities in the text- a similar website, word misspelled purposely, etc. And then I activate a filter to permanently delete those messages. Seems to work out! 🙂

  7. Zac, you're exactly like me lol 🙂 I leave messages to be read later, but tend to forget. These things ADD UP 🙁

    -Mike

  11. I have recently moved everything over to gmail. I do not use my gmail address tho. It is jsut a great way of keeping on top of everything when you are out and about.

  13. WOW!!! Is that like a real gmail account? a 177,000 + spam?? OMG man that is like crazy I get almost that much lol 😛 but my gmail account is going through Thunderbird 🙂

  14. Personally, I spend about 20 minutes a day dealing with emails (sending, reading, classifying, cleanup). Any more than that would be wasteful. Just setup a schedule for yourself. Check it in the morning, noon, and about 6pm. The rest of your time should be spent doing something productive, not waiting, or wasting time.

    In all my projects, I focus on high ROI. A lot of people forget that to calculate ROI, you not only have to include your expenses, but your time as well. If you get 500% ROI on a project, that's great. But if that project takes all of your time, then you know you need to do something differently.

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