I have used email for a long time. I remember when email started to grow and become used by more people. It was good to have an email address.
I made sure my wife and I had separate email addresses because we live separate lives and we are separate people with different interests. I remember others being frustrated because they would send an email to my wife and then wonder why I didn't know about it. They just seemed boggled by the idea that we would have separate email addresses. AND not read each other's emails.
Fast forward to today where email is clogged with spam. I subscribe to several different newsletters and I also have a bot that goes and gathers things for me and emails those things to me. I find email very useful for passing information around to others in a form that almost everybody can access now.
But I always keep in mind that email is like sending a postcard. It is something that passes through several different servers and is wide open for whoever owns that server to read it and save it. So I'm careful about what I send. Sending account numbers, ID numbers, passwords, and that sort of thing is a no-no for email. Unless you zip it up in an encrypted file and password protect the file or send encrypted email. And even then I'm kind of thinking it's risky so I don't do that if I can avoid it.
But that's not what I wanted to talk about. One of the issues that I kept running into is it all running together. Especially at work. As I would scan through the emails that I got I couldn't really tell when I was on a different day and how long it had been since this email had come to me. I tried tagging things. I tried setting up rules to tag things automatically. It all seemed to run together in one big blur.
One day I had a thought about divider lines. When you look at posters or letters or anything printed there's usually a line or a boundary between sections. It makes that section stand out a little bit and know that you're looking at something that's different than the rest of it. Especially in a one-page thing a header line or divider line between the sections helps a lot.
So my big idea was getting a divider line into my email inbox. I thought about that for a couple of days and then came up with an idea of having my bot send me an email every night in the middle of the night with a bunch of dashes as the subject.
A bunch of dashes. It sounds silly when I talk about it but it's been revolutionary for me. I added the date to the front of the line of dashes. Now has I scan down through my email I can distinctly see where each day of email starts and ends. It's amazing! It's so silly and sounds stupid but it's amazing.
It's helped me scan through things and find stuff a lot faster. When I go to search for specific days or or try to focus on one or two days of emails that I'm trying to dig something out of instead of having to search using their between two dates functions I just type in the date space ��� and it comes right to that day and I can quickly scan that these emails and find what I'm looking for.
Here's what it looks like
Today's date---------
Such a simple idea. And it's been so helpful to me.
Just thought I'd share!
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#email #idea
