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Tips for organizing email

• Create custom folders to organize your inbox. Some folders you might consider creating are:
  • Action
  • Awaiting Reply
  • For Reference
  • Personal
• Use your department’s file classification plan to create subfolders according to predefined classifications. For example:
  • FIN001 Budget
  • FIN002 Expenditures
• Create subfolders for a specific project/committee. For example:
  • Records Inventory Project
  • Budget 2021-2022
  • Strategic Planning Committee
  • Academic Search Committee
• Consider using the categories feature in Outlook to allow you to visually identify individual emails and/or email folders at a glance by colour. If used consistently, categories can improve your ability to  sort and search for messages.
• Rules can be useful for automatically sending an email to a specific folder. If there are specific people, subjects, categories, or topics that you always file in the same place, consider setting up rules to pre-sort your email (this can be helpful for managing messages received from discussion lists).

Tips for managing email discussion threads

• If the topic of an email thread changes, create a new email thread.
• Do not forward unnecessary information from previous emails to a new recipient.
• Use the conversation “clean-up tool” feature in Outlook with caution. When a conversation has split into separate conversations the “clean-up-tool” may delete intermediary emails that are older than the final email in the collection. Be sure to assess and mark important decision emails prior to running the tool.

Tips for organizing a shared inbox

When using shared email inboxes (e.g., advising@sfu.ca) it is important that users of the inbox have a shared understanding of how messages will be managed. The following should be agreed upon and ideally documented:

• Who should answer which messages and how will this be indicated to the team (e.g., colour coding, flagging, etc.)?
• If you are using the category feature in Outlook, agree on a taxonomy in advance.
• Who is responsible for capturing official records contained in the email?
• Where will the different types of email be retained if needed for reference?
• How long will messages in the inbox be retained and who is responsible for managing retention?

Tips for managing attachments

• Avoid using attachments where possible. Instead send a link to a shared location (this will prevent the multiplication of different versions of documents within email accounts).
• If you need a record indicating that a document has been sent, save the email and the attachment together as a PDF outside of your email.
• Incorporate version control and a naming convention so it is always clear which version of a document has been circulated.