There are a lot of different strategies out there and each person has to find what works best for them.  Here are a few queries that might help you think about how well your strategy is working for you:

1. Are you able to work through your e-mail inbox in a reasonable amount of time every day, respond to or delegate time-sensitive questions/comments, convert messages into to-do items, or otherwise file them away on the first pass through?
2. Do you make good use of e-mail filters available in your mail reading program to highlight/tag/sort messages in ways that make you more productive?
3. Are there mailing lists or other regular notifications that you could unsubscribe from or have re-routed, to minimize the e-mail that you just delete or file on a regular basis?
4. Do you have a system for filing email that allows you to quickly and intuitively retrieve messages (sent and received) that you need to review without a lot of searching or jumping around to different folders?
5. Are you purging or archiving old messages in a way that makes sense for your role and your use of email?
6. Are your auto-”check for new mail” settings calibrated to (or turned off for) being productive? (i.e. Do you really need to know about a new message the instant it comes in, or would it be okay to review new messages once an hour?  A few times per day?!?)

If you’re not employing any particular email management strategy, may I recommend the “Inbox Zero” series of articles from 43 Folders?  There’s a great video of a presentation about this approach to get you started.

What other tips or strategies do you use to keep email useful to you as a tool, instead of getting overwhelmed by it?

As his team prepares a final judgment on whether he can keep using e-mail, perhaps even in a read-only fashion, several authorities in presidential communication said they believed it was highly unlikely that he would be able to do so.

Diana Owen, who leads the American Studies program at Georgetown University, said presidents were not advised to use e-mail because of security risks and fear that messages could be intercepted.

“They could come up with some bulletproof way of protecting his e-mail and digital correspondence, but anything can be hacked,” said Ms. Owen, who has studied how presidents communicate in the Internet era. “The nature of the president’s job is that others can use e-mail for him.”

Surely there’s some middle ground to keep a President as tech-savvy as Barack Obama from being forced off of e-mail altogether? I mean, this is the guy who announced his VP pick by SMS text message, for crying out loud.

Here are some scenarios to explore:

It’s clear that the President could probably not have a public e-mail address that was directly addressable from any other e-mail account, and that was expected to be read by the President himself. It would be flooded hourly with requests, comments and threats from around the world, and instantly become useless as a form of effective correspondence.

The White House does already have a public e-mail address, comments@whitehouse.gov, but they make it clear that they probably won’t respond, and that you can’t even send graphics or attachments. (How the heck are we supposed to share funny photos of our cats, then!?) I suspect that they have some serious hardware and network capacity dedicated just to receiving and processing mail sent to that address – there’s no way that much or any of it will make it’s way to a laptop on the President’s desk.

Here’s one option: the President could have a private e-mail address that is directly addressable within the executive branch of the U.S. government, using a private domain (e.g. president@whitehouse.gov.private) and set of mail exchangers. This would allow Barack Obama to e-mail with other government officials who have established addresses, taking advantage of the utility of e-mail for more direct conversations and unfiltered access to information. Anyone wishing to reply to his messages could send e-mail like usual, and as long as they were on that private network, it would go through.

When the President wanted to send e-mail outside of this private network of addresses to a regular e-mail address, his message would be intercepted by a correspondence manager who could insure that the message was free of sensitive information, and that it would not be a source of embarrassment for anyone if delivered to the wrong hands.

Here’s a hard part: should that recipient with a regular e-mail address be able to reply? If it’s to some other regular e-mail address, e.g. “barack.obama@whitehouse.gov,” then that just wouldn’t do, because the address would eventually leak out and become just as much a target for a flood of messages as “comments@” might be now.

BUT, a variation on that might work. The President’s outgoing message could be dynamically rewritten to appear to come from an address that had an expiration date, and that used a unique hash token to prevent guessing it – this is common in software like TMDA and other special e-mail submission systems. So instead of

From: barack.obama@whitehouse.gov

it might be

From: barack.obama-JLK23ADSF23423K@whitehouse.gov

and it would only work for, say, up to 70 hours (or a week, or…). The next time the President responds, it comes from a different address, which also only works for 70 hours. In this manner, correspondents of the President with regular e-mail addresses could carry on an e-mail conversation and not worry about the address becoming public in a way that mattered. If someone tried to e-mail the expired address, they’d get a bounce back saying, “sorry, please e-mail comments@whitehouse.gov.”

For someone with a regular e-mail address to initiate a conversation with the President, we’d have to take a slightly different approach – the addresses would essentially need to go on a pre-approved list of correspondents whose messages would be allowed to go to “comments@whitehouse.gov” and be automatically filtered straight on through to the President’s internal (not publicly addressable) account.

So, to initiate an e-mail conversation with the President, you’d either have to be a known associate with a known e-mail address, or you’d have to be an employee of the Federal government with an established e-mail account. Better than nothing, right?

Another pitfall: the President would still generally have to consider any content sent via e-mail, whether it was to a private internal address or not, as up for public scrutiny. Until whomever controls Presidential records passes a law identifying some kinds of Presidential communications as truly private, it’s just the reality of the thing. And even if that did happen, we all know how easy it is for an e-mail that wasn’t meant for you to make it into your hands, so it’s probably just safe to assume that’s happening anyway.

From the article:

For all the perquisites and power afforded the president, the chief executive of the United States is essentially deprived by law and by culture of some of the very tools that other chief executives depend on to survive and to thrive. Mr. Obama, however, seems intent on pulling the office at least partly into the 21st century on that score; aides said he hopes to have a laptop computer on his desk in the Oval Office, making him the first American president to do so.

Well, that’s my brain dump on how it might work to let the President of the United States of America have an e-mail account he can actually use. What do you think?

My suggested tips for success:

1. Don’t leave the subject line blank. When you send someone an email with a blank subject line, they are lost. They have no idea what the message is about. Even if they know you, even if they’re expecting an email from you, there will be that moment where they just don’t know what’s gonna happen when they open your message. That kind of uncertainty breeds fear and paranoia, and you don’t want to be a part of that, do you?
2. Don’t put the name of the person you’re sending the message to as the subject line AND don’t put your name as the subject line. The sender/recipient information is already embedded in the message in these handy little fields called the “To:” line and the “From:” line. You need not repeat them, and it’s a waste of subject line space.
3. Don’t replace the subject line of a reply with something completely different (unless the topic has really completely changed). Even if the subject line is no longer completely accurate or timely (e.g. “feedback about this afternoon” still being used 3 days later), it’s still an important cue to the reader that tunes them into the ongoing conversation quickly. When you obliterate it just because you can, you make your recipient work harder. In some cases, mail reading programs also take advantage of the repeated subject line for better sorting and searching. One possible exception: if you’re forwarding on a message to someone for the first time, you can enhance the subject line for their clarity of understanding.
4. Be specific but concise, don’t use generic words. Your goal is to help the recipient know in about 5-10 words exactly what they can expect to find in the content of your message. If it’s a request that requires action, say so. If it’s an FYI, say so. Use nouns and verbs that will evoke meaning, and don’t use words that just take up space (e.g. “a message about…”).
5. If it’s time sensitive or high priority, indicate that. If someone gets a lot of email, they may not read your message right away, so don’t wait until the message body to indicate your expectations for how they will prioritize it. If you need a response by a certain date, tack that on to the end of the subject line, e.g. “reply by 10/5/08″. If it’s just generally high priority, you can say that instead (and in addition to using your mail program’s priority flag, which not all other mail programs recognize), e.g “high priority”.
6. Be careful about words that may be caught by junk mail filters. Sadly, a modern consideration for email sending is whether or not your message will seem suspicious to automated spam filters. If you use words that reference items of a sexual nature, pharmaceutical solutions, or money-making opportunities, know that your message may be more likely to be delayed. In some cases, your recipient may not ever see it.

Of course, efficiency isn’t always the only consideration in writing email subject lines. You may be writing to be clever or mysterious, or to brighten someone’s day, in which case you can happily throw out the above and I promise not to call you out on it.

How do those work for you? Do you have other tips and suggestions to add?

• Messages with a blank subject line
• Messages with a blank body, with only a mysterious attachment that’s supposed to explain everything when I open it
• Pretty much anything from Network Solutions / Verisign
• Anything that asks me to forward it to 11 of my friends for good luck
• Messages that start out by declaring that “this is not spam”
• Messages with more than three (3) consecutively-placed exclamation points in the subject line or greeting

What about you?