USA Today ran an article on Friday that mentioned my conflicted relationship with email that ultimately caused me to declare email bankruptcy. My friends, reminded of my woes, immediately reached out to support me. If only everyone had friends like I have…

So, how has life changed since email bankruptcy? Did the world collapse into burning inferno of email nonresponse? Did bankruptcy hurt my email credit score and force me into one of those high-interest email loan programs you see infomercials for on late-night TV? Have those whose emails I jettisoned started a Facebook group called “those who were shunned by Vanessa’s email bankruptcy and are plotting revenge”?

Amazingly enough, life has gone on. It was much easier to manage incoming mail without the deluge of 15,000 messages threatening to collapse the email system entirely. Anyone who needed a reply emailed me again. And this time, I was actually able to reply.

But I have a long way to go. I can see the email gathering forces, manning battle stations, and attempting to take me over once again. Everyone has a different data management style, and I think I’m learning some things about myself.

• I do a terrible job of deleting mail. I’m not sure why this is. I am an anti-pack rat with my physical belongings. I am merciless in shedding things I don’t need. And yet I’m unable to delete mail that offers me valuable business opportunties in Nigeria.
• I need to reply to mail right away. When I don’t, I get so much new mail that it completely pushes that mail that I’ve read and not replied to right off the page.
• My phone is great for staying caught up with mail, except that if I read something that I really can’t reply to on my phone, it can easily get lost on the email avalanche.
• I am still terrible at folder management.
• I have too many email accounts and I should probably consolidate them in some way.

It is better than it was, but I’ve by no means mastered the art of email nirvana. Ironically, the USA Today reporter contacted me while she was writing the story. She sent me an email. So, of course I didn’t see it until after her deadline had passed.

I realize writing spam email is difficult. You’ve got to set up scripts and buy mailing lists and harvest addresses and set up proxies. I know. It’s hard work. But if you’re going to go through all that trouble, you may as well go that extra step to really pull me in until I’m so compelled I can’t help but order your cheap viagra online because I would just be crazy not to. Even though I’m a girl.

After years of extensive research and experience of receiving and not reading spam mail, I pass my wisdom on to you.

1. Typos make your email seem more real. Computers spell everything correctly. Humans, not so much. We’re not great at typing and we forget our elementary school spelling lessons because we’ve had all those years since then of drinking vodka, I mean learning other things that crowd our brains. But if you’re going to go the typo route, really go all out. For instance, I have an email in my inbox right now with the subject line “P C PC н ³ê Ä£ ʽ90650″. Clearly, a computer couldn’t have written that. That is likely from some friend of mine drunk emailing me. I would be foolish not to click on it.
2. Include the word “Google” in the subject. Everything’s free at Google, so obviously, Google probably gives a lot of stuff away over email. For instance, I have an email right now that says I just won a Google lottery! It has batch numbers and reference numbers so it must be legit. Plus, it’s from Google, who would not lie about me winning the lottery, right? All I have to do is send them my bank information, plus a few other small details, so they can deposit the money into my account. That Google, so high tech. They don’t even need to mail me a check. Of course, the email tells me to keep the news of my winning private, to prevent any mixups, so I hope blogging about it won’t keep me from getting my winnings.
3. Write the email in a language other than the one I speak. I will find that exotic and sexy. I won’t know what I’m ordering, but I won’t be able to resist giving you my credit card number.
4. Call me your friend. Everyone can use more friends. And the best kind of friend is one who you’ve never heard of, who sends emails completely unsolicited. If the person is willing to do that without being asked, just think of how much help he’ll be when you need to move that heavy couch down two flights of stairs and into your new apartment.
5. Include profound stanzas of poetry. If you know poetry, you must be sincere. To really get me though, make obscure Chaucer references and quote Sylvia Plath. You might have to get an English degree to make these emails really authentic, but I think it’s a fair price to pay to make me really feel the pain you felt when your rich father/husband/uncle, who was the king/president/prime minister of an African and/or Eastern European country died and left you all of his money, but in such a way that you can only get to it if I take some of it as well.
6. Forget to replace your variables with actual, well, values. Sure, you could say, “Hello Vanessa. I love your blog at www.ninebyblue.com. It really speaks to me in a way that no other nude blog does.” But if instead you say “Hello Name. I love your blog at URL. It really speaks to me in a way that no other TOPIC blog does,” then I can see that you like me so much, you’ve given me a special nickname. And my blog is so definitive that you think of the domain as just URL. When you type something into that browser address bar, you don’t think of a URL beyond mine. There simply is no other URL. And my blog’s topic is the only topic you care to know. To you, my blog is the topic of life. There’s no need to classify it and give it some category name that fences it in and limits it. Oh value-free variables, you warm my heart and make me feel like this crazy old world makes sense after all.
7. Be creative with the free stuff. Look, anyone can offer an iPod, vacation to Mexico or prepaid phone card. You’re not actually going to send that out to anyone, so think outside of the box! If you want people to open your mail, tell them you’re giving away fields of unicorns! Smurfs! One of the smaller oceans! Which would you rather have the thrill of almost but not quite winning? A Home Depot gift card or a spa vacation on fluffy white clouds where angels fan you with their wings and share their cream cheese? That’s what I thought.

I really hoped you’ve stocked enough of that cheap viagra, because once you implement these tips, that stuff will just be flying off the shelves. Maybe you should get some back up cialis, just in case you run out.

After my post about how I dumped all my email and started over before it could suck the life entirely out of me and drag me into the murky depths of insanity and despair, several people commented that I should check out Getting Things Done. I read those comments and thought to myself. Huh. That sounds really interesting. Maybe I should order that.

Not long after, I happened to glance over at my bookshelf. Where I noticed this book. Called Getting Things Done. And vaguely recalled that a colleague suggested I try it months ago. I don’t even think I was complaining about my inbox at the time. I think he just observed my general state of being.

So, apparently I am too busy to remember that I ordered a book about dealing with being busy. And obviously, I was too busy to read it. I mentioned this to said colleague.

He said, “I can’t sharpen my axe right now, I’m too busy chopping wood with this dull blade!”

Indeed.

Email. One of the world’s great inventions. You can dash off a quick note to someone and when they’ve got a few minutes to reply, they send a quick note back. Doesn’t matter where you are in the world, what email system you’re using, if you’ve got spare change for a phone call. All you need is an internet connection.

My first job after college was pre-web. Sure, email existed, but it wasn’t exactly mainstream. I wrote a lot of memos at work. I would type them up, print them out, make copies, initial the From: line, and bring them to the mailroom so they could be distributed to everyone’s inboxes. You know, the physical ones on top of people’s desks. Sometimes, I had a wide cc list that included people from multiple locations. In that case, I would print my memo, walk it down to the copy center in the basement, give it to the Xerox guy we had working there full-time, wait for him to make the hundred copies, and then bring it to the mailroom. And I’d have to do things like use a yellow highlighter to mark who each copy was for on the 100 line cc list. Or stuff the copies into those interoffice envelopes for hours.

Sometimes, I wish those days were back.

My email situation has gotten so bad that when I read about email bankruptcy on valleywag, I thought I may have found the answer to my unsolvable problem. I looked at my mountain of mail and thought, what can I do other than start over? The alternatives suggested by Valleywag (that they cautioned would be too extreme for most people) didn’t seem extreme enough to help. Nor did the other solutions I read.

I had too much mail and not enough time, but I knew I had too many important messages to just dump everything. So what to do? I asked around. What do other people do? Some people said they used their inbox like a to do list. Sounds great, but my inbox had 15,000 messages in it — some read, some unread, some that I needed to deal with, some I just needed to delete. It had become impossible to even find the to dos.

What didn’t work:

• Keeping everything in my inbox with no deleting or categorizing. I use gmail and I have filters set up that label things in mailing lists and keep them from the inbox and have a filter that labels everything addressed specifically to me, but that just wasn’t enough. My inbox was still overflowing and I had no ability to keep up with it. It was like trying to sort the ocean into three pails, each the size of a thimble, and wondering what to do with the extra water.
• Over categorizing. Once I realized the lack of categorization wasn’t working, I set up the most granular organization system imaginable. For instance, I had Sitemaps – to do, Sitemaps – mobile, Sitemaps – blog, Sitemaps.org… you get the idea. It was just too much. I even tried setting up “to do” and “done” labels for each category. That also didn’t work. That was just hiding everything I had to do so that in addition to getting the work done, I had to work at finding it in the first place.

Clearly, I had to do something. Deleting it all and starting over with a new system was tempting, but so many people were expecting me to get back to them. I imagined a rising email army, swords raised, and the mob saying to me in perfect harmony, you killed my important email, prepare to die!

Last week, I set aside an entire day to figure it out. I went through everything in my inbox, one by one. Delete, file, need to address. I went through an entire month. And then I asked (as you do, on twitter), how far back should I go? The overwhelming twitter response was a month. If someone needs something from you and they sent you mail over a month ago, they’ll send you new mail. Or more likely, they’ll fashion a voodoo doll in your likeness, stick pins in it and throw it into a fire of burning coals and lava, but sending another email is one possibility.

So I took the plunge and moved everything from before April 1st out of my inbox and into a folder. I figured if I managed to get through the “need to address” items from April, I could start working on March. And then (after an entire day of sorting) my inbox was empty. Instantly, new mail started coming in, but with a clean inbox, it was easy to sort the new stuff.

I started tackling the highest priority mail. I am still, as it happens, tackling that high priority mail. What I really needed was a full “address email day” to follow my “email triage day”, but I had to do laundry and pack and fly to Philadelphia and speak at WebSearch University and do a few other things like that, so sadly, that full email day has not yet materialized.

I have already gotten several emails that were pings on things from pre-April and I’ve addressed those right away (guilt, you see, over sending the email to the land of email limbo in the first place), so perhaps it’s true that anything you need to address that’s older than a month will come and find you.

I discovered that I needed a new folder called “waiting”. Lots of times, once I address something, I can’t just move it to a done folder or delete it, because I’m waiting to get more information back before I can close it out. But I don’t want to keep it in my “need to address” folder, because then that’s more difficult to use as a to do list. By having a waiting folder, I can clear it from the list, but still have it handy to follow up on later. Or so the theory goes. I have barely made a dent in the to do list, much less made it to the follow up pile.

So, if you sent me mail in April, I am working on it. If you sent me mail before April, please send it again. Or at least make my voodoo doll look pretty before you throw it onto the coals.

How do you stay on top of your email? Any tips on avoiding email bankruptcy?