Jeffrey C. Long

I’ve had email since before I had internet. We had a Juno account back in my primitive Compaq days. Since that time I believe that I’ve had at least 15 different email accounts, each with varying degrees of clutter. One of the things that’s helped keep my ministry fresh has been email discussion groups which filled my inbox to the point of becoming useless. And like you, I have to register for access to sites, which often puts me on a mailing list for advertising at best, and spam at worse. After all these years and email accounts I have found some ways to tame the beast that I’d like to share.

1. Turn it off. Or at least check it at greater intervals. Same goes for instant messengers like MSN and AIM. I’ve read this in lots of productivity sites but only recently put it into practice. It singlehandedly has increased my productivity in multiple areas.

2. Get different accounts for different purposes. This is a recent trick. I own the domain name jeffreyclong.com so I can create multiple addresses for different uses. For example, all my discussion groups go into talkATjeffreyclong.com. Registrations for sites go to register@jeffreyclong.com. This keeps stuff out of my regular inbox so that important things don’t get lost. A simple solution for those without their own domain is to set up multiple accounts at gmail and use their POP service to read email from your mail client such as Outlook, Thunderbird, or Mac’s Mail.app.

3. Filter flamers.

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If you subscribe to email discussion groups, you’ll discover flamers. People who get easily upset, tell you what to do and generally cause problems in the group. I’ve spent way too much emotional energy dealing with these people. And honestly, I believe that we need an extra level of filtering when we are participating in groups online then face-to-face. So lately, I’ve been setting rules in my client to automatically put messages with so-and-so in the subject field, from field, or body. And after a season of not talking to certain people in my messengers who weren’t healthy for me, I’ve deleted them from there as well. What remarkable peace of mind this has brought. This is probably a little controversial, but Proverbs 22:24-25 teaches us to “not befriend a hot-tempered man,

and don’t associate with one who harbors anger lest you learn his ways, and ensnare your soul.” Establishing relational boundaries is very important to all of us, but I think especially pastors.

4. Use IMAP, or a version of POP that keeps email on the server. As I said, I’ve had multiple email accounts on 4 different computers. Most of my accounts were POP accounts where the messages were downloaded onto my computer when I logged in, and taken off the server. So, when a computer crashed and wasn’t backed up, I lost all my email. Now, given, most of that wasn’t a terrible loss. But my email correspondence has gotten more important to me and I’d really hate to lose what I have now. With IMAP, or server side POP, a copy of each message is downloaded to your computer when you log in, but everything stays on the central server. This allows for two things: The first is that if you are on a trip and away from your computer and need an important email, you can log in from any computer and view your emails like you would a yahoo or gmail account. The second and most important though, is that if your hard drive crashes, you haven’t lost everything. It’s all there on the server ready to be downloaded again next time you log in.

Hope this helps. I’d love to hear your email tips. Please comment below.

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