We all know that email overload may result in loss of time, loss of productivity and unanswered email. To solve this problem, you may go for a good spam filter – in order to have bad emails separated from all the mail you’ve received. Or you can choose an opposite direction, and apply an email prioritization technique, i.e. having good emails separated from the rest of your mail. What are the pros and cons of both methods, and what can we do to eliminate the cons?

Email Filtering Done with the Help of Spam Blockers

According to Symantec’s Intelligence Data, about 8% of all mail was identified as spam in 2001. Email users were not overloaded with email then, and cleaning your Inbox from spam took only several minutes per day. Today spam rates are between 65% and 75% (depending on a season and special events), so removing spam by hand might take much more time.

Thanks to email spam filters, the process of email screening was simplified greatly. You could open your Inbox in the morning and see only a couple of spam messages in there; the rest of your messages would be legitimate emails. Email spam filtering may be based on sender email address, IP or domain blacklists, URL and attachment analysis, Bayesian spam filtering and other predefined rules. In most cases, you can even customize your spam filter to meet your requirements.

However the problem of email overload is not spam-related only. Even with all junk mail removed, you’ll still suffer the problem of an unmanaged Inbox. Emails from legitimate senders can be of different priority for you, so you need to know which ones are most important and which ones can be postponed.

Pros:

• Spam filters save time that you could have wasted on removing spam from your Inbox.
• The previously reported spam messages will no longer hit your Inbox.

Cons:

• Thousands of spam emails may reach Inboxes before a spammer’s email address, IP or domain is blacklisted.
• Spam filtering is machine-based so there is a room for mistakes called “false positives.”
• Bayesian filters may be fooled by spammers, e.g. in a case of using large blocks of legitimate text.
• A legitimate email sender may use potentially “suspicious” words without knowing it and trigger a spam filter.

Email Prioritization: Manual and Automatic

Initially people did email triage by hand and this tedious task consumed a great amount of time. One had to look through all emails, separate the good from the bad, and then categorize the “good” messages by priority. These could be emails that needed to be answered right away, messages to be forwarded, tasks to be delegated or just information which could be saved for future reference and did not require immediate action.

Later, email users discovered the power of email rules. You would simply tell your email client what to do with the emails which come from a particular sender, have particular words in a subject line or have other specific features which might help you differentiate these emails from the others. Email rules were definitely a godsend for many email users who had been drowning in email.

However email rules can’t help you much if you expect an important email but know nothing about his/her email address, the words which might be used in the email, etc. You’ll have to look through all emails, including the Spam box, every 15 minutes or so – in order to avoid missing that important email.

Pros:

• After emails are prioritized, you can focus your attention on important emails first.
• Further emails from important senders will always hit your Inbox if you apply email rules.

Cons:

• It takes time to look through all emails if you choose to prioritize them by hand.
• Even if you do automate the process of email prioritization, it takes time to create email rules.
• Email rules will not always work well for emails from unknown email senders.

A Formula for Effective Email Management

As you see, using a spam filter is not enough to have an organized Inbox every morning. You’ll still have to sort the remaining messages by priority, as some emails should be replied to urgently while some can be postponed or archived. This takes time.

Email prioritization alone is not the ultimate solution to prevent email overload either. In this case you’ll have to sort ALL messages, including spam. And spam emails can make up 75%+ of your Inbox!

Taking all this into account, here is the best formula of the effective email management:
Effective Email Management = A Good Email Filter + Intelligent Email Prioritization

Let’s put this principle to work: you should not give up using a spam filter, plus you need an intelligent solution to automate email prioritization tasks.

This is where the EmailTray email client will fit your needs. It will aggregate junk mail from the Spam folders of all your tracked email accounts and double-check if any important messages have been mistakenly trapped by a spam filter of your Mail Service Provider. Besides, EmailTray will categorize the rest of the messages under the “Top priority”, “Low priority” and “No priority” tabs. All you’ll have to do is concentrate on the top priority messages first; then attend emails under the “No priority” tab. Then, if you have some spare time, you may want to look through the “Low priority” messages where you may wish to take the time to unsubscribe from the newsletters and notifications you’ll find there or mark certain senders as spammers so their future emails fall under the spam tab. By the way, once per day you can delete all the spam under the unified “Spam” tab which will ensure that all your spam boxes inside all your Webmail accounts are cleared.

You can always download EmailTray for Windows or get the EmailTray email app for your Android device, and enjoy an organized Inbox!

Our EmailTray development team believes that everything should grow and improve in the spring. And they implement this approach in our smart free email client development. That is why today we have some great news: both the EmailTray for PC and the EmailTray for Android email app have been updated.

What’s new in the EmailTray for Android email client app

The main changes in EmailTray for Android email client app have been about usability and the interface. Starting with widgets that have become neater and better looking, look out as well for an updated settings screen that is now even more intuitive. These changes are not all that noticeable at first sight, but they do make your experience more pleasant.

EmailTray on your mobile device is becoming more and more full-featured at a pace to be envied: now you can save a signature to be added to all your emails and cut the sender’s signature in a reply. This is great for quick and informal mobile email communications. Besides, more options for your unread email sorting were added and now you can arrange your emails in the most comfortable way.

As always, we are glad to get your comments and feedback!

What’s new in the EmailTray for Windows

First of all noticeable updates have been made to the EmailTray address book. Now it’s a full-featured address book that makes your contact management easy and quick. You can move contacts from multiple webmail accounts to the EmailTray email client with ease. An advanced data import system now includes the automated import of contacts from email accounts of major webmail providers, full data synchronization with Gmail Contacts and the on-demand import of contacts from Facebook and LinkedIn.

We all have our own ways to work with everyday email. EmailTray wants to make your everyday routine as pleasant and free from email overload as possible. That is why we give you freedom in choosing comfortable settings. Now you can arrange incoming messages not only by date or email account but also by sender. Changes were also made to your signature settings: you can not only set different signatures for a new letter and a reply/forward, but also have no signatures added.

EmailTray continues to care for your online safety: all suspicious, spam or phishing emails are marked with a special line, informing you about possible malicious content.

The support for major webmail service providers has been improved. Now the support of IMAP accounts features instant notification on new mail, i.e. you will know about new important messages the moment they appear in your webmail Inbox. So there will be no need to check your email every minute, while you wait for something important that you expect.

As it has been said previously, one of our main goals is your data safety. Now you can backup your EmailTray mail database including: all messages (Inbox, Sent, Drafts, Trash, Archive), your address book, your signatures and all possible settings (list of your configured accounts, custom rules, your business card, alerts, etc.). Moving to another PC or laptop? Restore your mail data from the backup file and proceed with your work without delay.

What is effective email management? It’s having your emails organized, responding to them in a neat and timely manner, never losing important emails and having no stress at work because of a cluttered Inbox (email overload). See below five elements which make the process of email management more effective and worry-free.

Element #1: Track all mail in one place

How many active email accounts do you run? Three, five, ten, or even more? Let’s give it a count.
First, you surely have at least one personal email address to communicate with your friends and relatives.
Second, you most probably use a corporate email address for your business. If you run several business projects you will be using several corporate email addresses, right?
Also, most of us have a couple of extra email addresses used for online subscriptions, one-time registrations, trials, etc. You do not expect any important messages from these email accounts but you still have to check them from time to time – to confirm online registrations, get your promotion codes and download links, etc.

It’s a wise thing to use an email client to manage multiple email accounts from one place, preferably offline as well as when your computer or mobile device is connected to the Internet. You will need to choose software that runs on your operation system and supports all email services and protocols that you deal with – including most popular Webmail providers (Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail, and AOL Mail), POP3 and IMAP. If you use the Windows OS or an Android smartphone, the EmailTray email client could be of great help here.

Element #2: Classify emails according to their priority

Before you start dealing with your emails, it is important to classify messages according to their priority – to be able to attend to them in a priority order. Thus, will need to separate the wheat from the chaff – so that you can focus on the most important emails first and reply to urgent messages quickly.

The process of email sorting traditionally includes three important steps:

• Deleting spam messages from your Inbox
• Sorting the rest of the emails by priority: urgent and most important first, less important to come next – including news, subscriptions, payment checks, etc.
• Revising the contents of the Spam folder – just in case any good messages have been mistakenly trapped by spam filters.

You can do all this by hand, several times a day, taxing your brain and wasting your time. Or you could delegate spam detection and email sorting jobs to email productivity tools – to free up your brain and your hands and save valuable time. See Element # 5 in this list for more details on email productivity tools.

Element #3: Unsubscribe from what you no longer read

Unsubscribe from the newsletters and services you no longer need or read. Are you a parent of a grown-up kid? That probably means that you no longer need a subscription to your favorite kids clothing store where you used to shop several years ago… Reading too many newsletters on the same topic and coming across the same entries often? Stay subscribed to those that cover the events most efficiently, and say good-bye to those who copy-paste.

A bad habit of being subscribed to “everything I might possibly need in the future” eats up your time and productivity. Email overload has been recognized as a serious hindrance to getting things done in the corporate world and in modern personal lives. So find a day to run a detox hour with all of your email subscriptions and unsubscribe from those that clutter up your Inbox and add no value to your everyday life.

Element #4: Keep your answers short and neat

It is for the benefit of you and your email recipients to deal with emails as quickly as possible. So keep your answers short and value your time and the time of people you communicate with.

Tip: Use email signatures to save an extra minute on typing salutation and your name at the bottom of the email message. The good news is that most of the advanced email clients will give you a possibility to create different email signatures for each individual email account.

Element #5: Use email productivity tools

As mentioned above, if you value your time, make sure to use smart productivity tools to automate email management jobs. It is not enough to have all your email messages aggregated in one place. It’s important to have your emails organized.

For example, you could take advantage of the smart email filtering feature offered by the EmailTray email client. It will detect the emails which are important for you because of your email habits and give you the option of dealing with these messages first. EmailTray is also capable of rescuing important email messages mistakenly trapped by spam filters, so you can forget about the problem of missed emails!

A good email contact management system will sync across various devices (desktop, smartphone, notebook) and keep all your email contacts in one place.

It would also be cool to set up your mail client to alert you to the most important emails only, not to each and every email. Can your favorite email client do this for you? EmailTray can, so grab your copy of the EmailTray free email client now!

Recently the EmailTray for Android app v1.2 was released. You can install it from Google Play or update your installed application. The best thing about this update is that the Android-application is now as good in rescuing good emails from the Spam folder as the desktop EmailTray already is.

Why do you need to rescue something from the Spam folder?

You surely use spam filters to protect yourself from being distracted by nonsense. But these spam filters, unfortunately, make mistakes and bury the emails you need to answer in the Spam folder.

Nobody wants to look through thousands of emails proposing that you buy a Rolex replica or that you help a Nigerian princess rob her country just so you don’t miss something important. And EmailTray is here to help you with that: it’s much more than a spam filter.

Our approach to the problem of excessive spam and information overload is innovative and effective: instead of putting suspicious emails into the Spam folder, the EmailTray email client picks your important emails out of the spam folder and puts them into Top and Low priority folders. When a spam filter puts an important email into the Spam folder by mistake, EmailTray is likely to notice this, with the help of special smart algorithm, and rescue it.

Now you can use the advantages of this approach on your Android-based mobile device. Let’s celebrate this with a cocktail. And the best cocktail, we are sure, is using both the EmailTray for Android app and the EmailTray for your PC.

Why is it the best choice to put EmailTray both on your mobile device and on your desktop?

A mobile device in your pocket is a working tool that is always available. We are sure you will begin to enjoy our approach to your inbox and would like to use EmailTray both on your mobile device and on your desktop. Use the same EmailTray account for both platforms. That way, if you mark someone as a spammer on your mobile phone or quickly write them back, we’ll know how to handle these senders on your other platforms (and IMAP mail will be marked read or deleted when you get to work in the morning). This will help you to get the most from EmailTray’s smart ranking algorithm. With one EmailTray account you can install EmailTray on any device and have your emails sorted from the first launching. It doesn’t matter what you choose: the original EmailTray, the all new EmailTray Beta (link expired), or the EmailTray for Android email client; you may be sure that your inbox will always be in order.

What should your perfect email client do? What functionality are you still looking for? I’ve tried to use webmail interfaces, checked different email clients, and chose EmailTray. Now I will tell you what features allow me to say that EmailTray is the perfect tool to manage emails.

1. Smart email sorting.

EmailTray helps me to keep my inbox in order.

EmailTray ranks all incoming mail using a proprietary email ranking algorithm, singles out important messages and then lists them under the Top Priority and Low Priority tabs.

With EmailTray you can stop looking through all your “incoming” trying to find the most important email – EmailTray does this for you. Like an attentive personal assistant, it places all the top priority emails into a special folder. If you like to have all your papers, desktop and email in order – this feature alone is enough to try EmailTray, but there are 9 more:

2. Rescuing good mails from spam.

EmailTray helps me not to lose an important email in the Spam folder.

You have certainly found important emails in the Spam folders of your Outlook and webmail now and then. EmailTray scans the spam folders of specified webmail and IMAP accounts and, using our special algorithm, moves good emails trapped by the spam filters to the Inbox.

3. Enhanced address book.

EmailTray helps me to manage my contacts and keep them up-to-date.

Manage your contacts in EmailTray and sync your contact list with your Google Contacts. Besides, the smart algorithm will help you to merge your contacts’ address cards, if there are several addresses for the same person.

4. Real people behind the emails.

EmailTray makes email conversation a real person-to-person communication.

EmailTray shows your contacts’ data from their social profiles on Facebook and LinkedIn. So when you receive an email from a new person, you can see a photo and some information.

5. Phishing and scam emails recognition.

EmailTray keeps an eye on my online security.

Attempts to acquire information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details, masked as a trustworthy entity in email are unfortunately common these days.  EmailTray checks whether the sender is real and shows you the official icon if it is (for large or participating email senders that we work with). Now you can feel safe about your passwords and credit cards details.

6. Your email data locked with a password.

EmailTray keeps my private emails really private.

This option can help you feel safe about your email accounts if you use EmailTray on a computer that is used by several users. Set a password and only you will be able to use your EmailTray.

7. Customized signatures.

EmailTray chooses the corresponding signature automatically for each account you write from.

When I used other email clients, I always had to write “With best regards, Aliona” manually in the replies. With EmailTray you can have several signatures that will be automatically used in the first emails, replies or forwards for specific email accounts.

8. Instant message search.

EmailTray helps me find everything I need in a split second.

EmailTray offers a lightning-fast Instant Search feature which allows you to quickly find what you are looking for.  You just enter the first letters of the contact name, contents of the email subject or email message contents – and EmailTray shows you the results.  The difference between EmailTray and Microsoft Outlook is like day and night in this regard.

9. Syncing your email accounts between all your computers.

EmailTray keeps all my email accounts synchronized between all my computers.

Nowadays there hardly is a person who uses only one computing device. We are so Internet connected that email is checked several times per day from work, the restaurant you have lunch at or your home. EmailTray syncs all your email accounts between all your computing devices, so you may be sure that your inbox is always up-to-date. Yes, an EmailTray for Android app is available that works in sync with the desktop client.

10. Managing all emails from one place.

EmailTray manages all my webmail, POP3 and IMAP from one place.

Add all your email accounts to your EmailTray and it will help you to manage all of them at once, including those based on Webmail (Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail, AOL Mail), POP3 and IMAP.

Welcome to the corporate blog of the EmailTray Team! We promise to keep you updated on every little feature appearing in the EmailTray email client, so stay tuned and never miss a chance to learn more about EmailTray so you can make your mail flow more easily and enjoyable to process!

In two words, EmailTray is a free lightweight email client (desktop and Android mobile) the desktop version of which offers you many features that normally come with a regular email client:

• Tracking multiple email accounts
• New mail notifications
• Instant search across messages
• Custom email rules
• HTML editing
• Custom signatures

Apart from these essential features, EmailTray also offers a unique email sorting feature which beats all other email clients because it allows you to forget about ever experiencing a flooded inbox. Thanks to EmailTray, you can now concentrate on the most important messages only. EmailTray analyzes all messages that come to your Inbox and prioritizes those it considers really important to you.

How does EmailTray know for sure which email messages are important to you and which are not? The secret lies in a smart email sorting algorithm which helps EmailTray determine which messages come from authorized email senders or people that you or your friends have previously communicated with, which emails come from official companies and which are junk mail.

If you are tired of email overload and want an effective solution to overcome it – EmailTray is your best choice! If you still don’t use this simple yet smart email client – it’s time to give it a try!

Welcome to our blog and stay tuned for the most recent news on new EmailTray releases and software updates, new features, insider notes, how-to’s and much more!

Best regards,

The EmailTray Team