Continuing on what Mark started, I will explain how I do my email.

Mail is usually always open whenever I am here at the office, at home doing my own things, or on the iPhone. It’s hard to not be able to reach me. To be able to do this efficiently though, I setup IMAP on my email accounts rather than POP. IMAP allows me to be able to read a email on the go and mark anything I read as read, so later on in the evening everything I just read is marked as read so I don’t have to go through them all again. Same goes with deleting.

If I ever see a email in there, it bugs me not to look at it. I don’t do anything special with organizing my email, although I probably should. I just have a inbox for each of my accounts; BKWLD, .Mac, and my personal email.

One thing I tend not to do is delete email (other than spam of course), if I ever need to go back and look through my email I can. Although now with Time Machine, I can probably get away with it. If you have any suggestions, let me know.

There has been a lot of discussion round the office about how everyone manages email over the past couple of days. While the basic idea of email is pretty simple, the endless number of tricks people employ to wrangle their inboxes into a manageable state fascinates the ever-loving crap out of me. So I thought I’d share my tricks.

I’m a partial subscriber to Marilyn Mann’s inbox zero methodology. By partial, I mean I don’t really care about having zero messages in my inbox, but I do only turn on my email when I’m ready to go through and process all my new messages. By process, I mean put to-dos in my to-do list, put appointments in my calendar, respond to questions, and/or just plain do what I need to do so that I can delete the message and never think about it again; unless that message contains something I may want to hang on to, in which case I just leave it in my inbox after processing it. When I’m not processing my email, I quit my email program (I use Apple Mail to manage my 3 email accounts on all my computers via IMAP).

I don’t file emails into specific folders. Every email that I don’t delete, stays in my inbox. When I need to find something, Mail’s Spotlight search is 1000x more efficient for me than any amount of filing or color coding. To keep things easy on the eyes, I have a smart folder called Unread with a simple rule:

I use this Unread smart folder as my default email view. I read all of my messages in the preview pane, and have Organize by Thread enabled (this groups all messages by Subject). I keep my messages sorted by Date Received in descending order.

I also have two other smart mailboxes that I use less frequently:

• Flagged - all flagged messages in any mailbox
• Attachments - all messages with attachments in any mailbox

I’ve found that setting aside time to deal with and process email at regular intervals throughout the day has virtually eliminated my need to file or color code them in a way that makes them easier to find, simply for the fact that I have already dealt with them and no longer need to find them. When I do need to find something, a Spotlight query is simply faster than looking for colored subject line in multiple nested folders.

[Update] included some images.

I’ve been building two big ass sites for the past few months that both have auto-play elements on many of their pages. I work best when I can put the headphones on, but when iTunes is your main music source, listening to music isn’t very pleasant when you have audio that starts up every time you re-load a page. During the last phases of front end layout, I often have four or five browser windows displaying content. Multiple instances of the same audio playing at different intervals is horribly annoying, even if it’s a song you still enjoy after the 9000th time you’ve heard it.

My professional recommendation as a web developer is to not auto play media on your page. It’s annoying, it can be jarring late at night, and it can get you in trouble at work. These seem like things you generally wouldn’t want to do to the people supporting your site/business. But the customer is always right, and I aim to please.

Enter Audio Hijack Pro. I’ve been using Audio Hijack to some degree for years to capture audio from various applications on my computer, but until recently, it never occurred to me to use it for controlling live audio—or more accurately, muting the audio of a specific application!

Now that I can mute Firefox, Safari, and my entire virtual Windows machine, iTunes can have free reign of my system without interruption. I only wish I thought of doing this years ago.

Interesting piece by Prince McLean on Apple Insider regarding Apple’s dominance of WiFi market share.

Last week, the analyst told Macworld that the AirPort Extreme lead US retail sales as the top selling router in April

I find this interesting because we’ve been going through some ISP growing pains in our Sac office. We recently switched from an AT&T DSL plan to a plan with a smaller, lesser known company. A few red flags came up with this company when the technicians came in. For one, they were surprised to see we were an all Mac shop. None of them had any experience whatsoever with Macs. Secondly, they seemed to not be able to grasp the idea that the Apple Airport Extreme base station was actually a full-blown network router. Even after showing the technician the configuration screens of the Airport Utility, he still insisted that we get “a real router.”

To appease him, we got the new router and wired it into our network, but promptly removed it once he left. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Airport Extreme base station is a more than capable 802.11n router.

It’s interesting to hear that the Airport Extreme base station is actually the top selling wireless router on the market. Also interesting is that there is actually a fairly successful ISP with no grasp of reality as it pertains to popular consumer hardware in their industry.

We have since closed our account with this company as they were only able to provide us with bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps downstream, and not the 10 Mbps we were paying for. We are now very much enjoying our new 20 Mbps downstream/3 Mbps upstream Comcast cable connection.

Campaign Monitor has published their 2008 Email Design Guidelines.

As with most articles published by Campaign Monitor, this is a must read. To summarize, not too much has changed technically from last year when Microsoft decided to use Word to render HTML in Outlook.

What’s new in 2K8

The mobile market is expected to grow substantially. While the iPhone’s mail client can pretty much handle anything Safari can, Blackberry people will be best served with plain text this year.

Possibly the most important thing to keep in mind going forward is a push by ISPs and email providers to consider relevance as a key part of defining spam. I.e. being more upfront about what kinds of information you will be sending consumers during the signup process, and making good on that promise down the road.

Get up to speed

For those of you that are a little late to the party, it’s important to realize that sending email newsletters is an entirely different thing than making a website. For one, in the US there are federal laws in place that can result in steep fines and prison time for those who violate them. Do I have your attention? Good.

People get lots of email. Most people get substantially more email today than they were a year ago. Not only are email inboxes flooded with email, they are also increasingly becoming a hub for to-do lists, calendar appointments and RSS aggregation. Your email campaigns are competing with quite a lot of information. Because of this, it is important to remember that the primary focus of your email should not be the way it looks, but rather to clearly communicate a message to the reader.

Of course, a big part of clear communication is branding and visual design, but it’s important to know what is appropriate for the medium you are using, and even more important, what is possible with the medium you are using.

General Motors hosting an H2 test drive inside a movie theatre that is showing Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth would be equal parts inappropriate and ineffective. Sending a PDF file of your entire product catalog to your mailing list would yield about the same degree of success.

Before you send rich HTML email communications to your subscribers, take note of these facts, and then talk to someone with experience.

• Image blocking is the norm. Compose your email with actual text and pretty it up with images that have alternate content. DO NOT rely on images to communicate your message.
• You need to have permission to email people. It’s the law.
• Make unsubscribing easy. This is also the law.
• What is easy on the web is infuriatingly difficult in email. Keep it simple.
• On average, 50% of your subscribers will open your email. 10% will interact with it.
• Most consumers view email in a web client like Gmail or Yahoo!. HTML rendering varies from browser to browser, but more over, from within the web based email client inside the browser. KEEP IT SIMPLE.
• Most business people view email in MS Outlook. Outlook uses MS Word to render HTML. Try opening a web page in MS Word.
• It’s 1000x easier to keep your nose clean using a hosted email service than it is to use software installed on your computer or web server to do it. By keeping your nose clean, I mean not breaking the law and being sued for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Unsolicited ass kissing

I send close to 50 email campaigns out each year for clients in a wide range of industries, and I use Campaign Monitor for each and everyone. In addition to being light-years ahead of every other email campaign management service out there, they freely publish tips and tutorials for creating effective campaigns that are based on actual test cases and factual information. They have even started a grassroots coalition to improve support for web standards in email clients. If you are not using them to send your email campaigns, you should be using their site to educate yourself. They are the gold standard.

Andy Baio has been making some very interesting charts on music sales from Whitburn Project data recently. Friday he charted One-hit-wonders longevity.

I found the Diversity graph to be the most sobering. Obviously, those who get their music fill from top 40 radio have never been thought of as the most discerning music listeners, but to see that Billboard’s attempt to more accurately record diversity only expose the fact that there is actually less diversity in popular music is a bit of a surprise. Especially when it feels like there are more musical styles getting airplay these days. We didn’t exactly have hip-hop, metal, and smooth jazz in the 50’s.

Billboard charts reflect music sales, and with the decline of music sales as a whole, what’s selling for money, and what’s played on the radio don’t necessarily jive like it used to.

Selling records was a fun little blip in music history while it lasted. I wonder what will come next?