A Few Tips on Email Management

At Rapport Tax, we frequently use emails to contact you, so it’s important that you regularly check your inbox for emails from us to avoid missing out on important ATO emails, your notices of assessment, invoices, and much more. To make sure you can easily keep track of your emails, here are a few tips that can help you improve your email management.

1. Check and manage your email regularly

The best way to make sure your inbox doesn’t get overwhelmed, is to regularly check and go through your emails, once a week, or even better, daily. Unsubscribe to those uninteresting newsletters, block those suspicious emails, and your inbox email count will go down leaving only the emails that you want to see. This is much easier to do if you link your smart phone to your email.

2. Be sure to check your junk email every so often

You’ll often hear this, but be sure to check your email every so often. Sometimes, the server will chuck very important emails into the junk email folder and not into the inbox, meaning you won’t see the email until it’s too late.

3. Unsubscribe to any newsletters you no longer read

It’s very easy for email subscriptions to get out of hand, increasing the clutter in your inbox and making it harder to find those important emails. By unsubscribing, you’ll reduce the bulk of the emails in your inbox and make it harder to miss the important ones.

4. Block or move emails

If you can’t seem to find that unsubscribe button, or you’ve received an email that seems suspicious, it might be a good idea to block or direct future emails from that address to your junk email. Keeping dangerous or unwanted emails out of your inbox is vital to protecting your personal information and helping you find that important email from Rapport Tax.

5. Link your email to your smart phone

In today’s day and age, people have less and less time to sit down and do what they need to do, such as go through their emails at a desktop or laptop. A great way to get around this is to link your email to your smart phone. This will allow you to see your emails on your smart phone as they come in and also make sure your inbox won’t build up with an overwhelming number of emails. Of course, this tip is more effective if you’ve also done some inbox trimming with the other tips.

6. Create a second ‘throw-away’ email

It’s great to have an email where you can just use and forget, allowing unimportant emails to pile up out of sight, reducing the clutter in your main inbox. Just be careful not to get your emails mixed up! I suggest naming your ‘throw-away’ email something silly so it’s harder to mix up.

7. Watch out for non-legitimate emails

The internet is rife with unscrupulous threats so it’s best to always be on guard when using the internet. This is especially the case with emails. Emails such as scams and phishing emails are possible threats to your personal information and rely on your own undoing to succeed. Provide your sensitive personal information to a suspicious link and you could be at risk of significant loss. The best way I’ve found to avoid these suspicious emails, is to simply look at the email address and if it’s got a random assortment of letters, numbers and symbols, chances are that it’s illegitimate. Just remember, if an email sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.

8. Use the email functions available

A great way to help further manage your folder is to use the functions that are a part of the email system you’re using. For example, use stars (Gmail) or flags to highlight those important emails that you want to come back to later on. Delete the emails you won’t need to look at anymore. Can’t find an email? Use the ‘search’ bar near the top of the window. Take some time to familiarise yourself with your email system, and consciously work on incorporating them into your inbox management.

Follow these great email management tips and you’ll be well on your way to a slimmer inbox and fewer headaches, saving you plenty of time and helping you find that email from Rapport Tax.