"HELP! I'm drowning""HELP! I'm drowning"
Is this the plea of a person tossed overboard? No, this is the plea heard across corporate America trying to handle the volume of email that crosses our inbox each day. The last time I was out of the office for a week, I faced a pile of 1,200 emails to dig out under. This doesn't even count the emails that were caught in my spam filters or my newsletters that were automatically routed to specific folders. Can you relate?
This subject is a small departure from the normal subject of creating effective websites. However, email plays a large role in the online experience for most of us (many people have an email account long before they have a website). In that vein, I'd like to share one tool that has helped lessen my email time - at least a little bit.
It's a tool called MailTemplate for Mac Mail. It allows me to quickly generate a reply to those emails that I find myself typing over and over again. Each week, we get a number of leads from our website from people requesting assistance with their website. Using MailTemplate, I can send a detailed response, including our consultation questionnaire, with just a simple click of the mouse.
By right-clicking (or ctrl+click), in my email reader,I get a handy menu that allows me to:
- Reply with a Template or
- Create a new message with a template
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The software itself has some nice features:
- Easily include attachments
- A nice list of dynamic options (such as date, name, email address of the sender, etc) that you can easily include in the body of your template.
- The ability to easily copy templates
However, I have found the interface to be a bit clunky with unclear icons (is that a hard drive to click to save) and no red "x" to close the window.
But, overall, this has been a tool that has been a great time saver. Here's where you can get your copy:
If you aren't a Mac user, here are a couple easy links to Google's listing for:
Hopefully a tool like MailTemplate can be a small life-ring as you strive to keep from drowning in a sea of email overload.
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