8,280 Emails in One Month!
A Tsunami of WA Emails
8,280.
That's how many emails I've received from Wealthy Affiliate since joining a little over a month ago.
Some are new blog posts from members, some are telling me a comment has been liked, some are questions looking for answers, some are requests for comments, some are PMs and many are responses to blog posts of mine.
But whatever, 8,280 represents a lot of time spent on emails. Even if it's just to drag them into a folder without reading them.
Please don't get me wrong. I love the community aspect of WA and emails keeping me up to date with what others are doing is part of that.
But 8,280 of them?
I've become pretty good at making a snap decision on whether or not I want to read one, based on the headline. A side benefit is that it's made me more aware of the importance of attention getting headlines for my own stuff, including blog posts.
Research Indicates that Swan Pairings May Not be as Permanent as First Thought
Lady Swans Are Having Affairs!
Which headline would you click on?
But back to the matter at hand.
I think I need to apply some filters to the stream of WA emails.
I wondered if other WA members have come across this issue and can offer any insights or solutions.
Recent Comments
28
Hi Phil. The one thing we no longer do is move emails to a folder with the intent of reading them later. Therein lies madness. Either a post is interesting enough to read when we first see it or we delete.
Colette and Philip
It's actually quicker to move them than it is to delete them. For me anyway. But that's how I knew how many there were.
Thanks for this post because I've learned from the responses below. I'm heading over to account settings now.
Hi Phil, good post, great comments below, giving good solutions to the amount of emails we receive. Thank you.
Murray
Yes. I have every type of notification enabled to which means 1000s of emails too.
You can check your settings and uncheck any types of notifications you don’t want.
I setup a folder filter in gmail. I can cherry pick what I read and bulk delete all messages.
Being selective as Kim describes is almost mandatory as you followers list grows. That is unless you're ok with spending half your WA day sorting emails.
Hi Phil - I've neer counted mine!
I do pretty much as you do, scan the headlines and see what I think is relevant to me at the time. If anything looks like it might be useful in future, I'd bookmark it but you can imagine what happened there :-) So I stopped. It's still all online to look for when needed.
Now I operate a use it or lose it policy. If I think a WA email headline looks interesting but I'm really busy, I'll keep it otherwise I delete the email. But I do go back and read it later on, usually within a few days and then delete the email so the emails tell me how much catching up I have to do.
If I sorted as some suggest (Marion) I'd just never get around to reading them :-(
The only change I made to my email notification settings was to switch off Likes as they don't need any reply.
There is so much good, useful and interesting content on WA that I think you have to be pretty picky about what you read. I rose through the Ranks by getting heavily incolved in some discussions a while back to the detriment of my site. It's difficult NOT to get involved :-) but I do intend to slow down and my Rank is falling as a consequence.
So, being very discriminating is my solution :-)
Ian
Thanks Ian. I totally agree. The only reason I know how many is that it's quicker to drag them to a folder than it is to delete them and the folder displays the number.
I use Thunderbird as my email client and it sorts the emails into folders based on my rules. Domain Specific WA Site Email Using Thunderbird free
Thanks, Marion, I've been meaning to take a look at Thunderbird.
You can do the same with Outlook, of course. Just haven't gotten around to it.
also in Gmail, you can put rules on how to shorten all the incoming emails.
Have a great day
Tommy
Hi Marion ... I assume you also use Firefox for your PC browser?
I use Firefox as my browser, but am still clunking along with comcast email as part of our package. It allows me to create incoming email folders just like your image above, but I have to do the sorting work.
Actually, Chrome is my browser of choice. I only use Firefox to see what other people are seeing. It's a good idea to check your website using the other browsers as sometimes things look different.
Hi Phil. You can also get the same messages when you click the notifications above (the bell), on your profile, on your blog posts, etc. I just check them here on the platform. You can turn off the email notification. Go to Account Settings by clicking your photo in the top left corner. Scroll down to "Automatically log me in from links in email notifications" and click off.
Erin :)!
As always I am appreciative of your knowledge wisdom and overstanding of the WA system. This was just what I needed. Guidance and Protection
I'm with Erin. I turned off all of the topics that I knew were duplicated on the site. Just this morning, I turned off blog posts and discovered that my dashboard is a bottomless feast of information!
Or filter down the email notification categories to a vital few. And like Erin has stated go to notifications occasionally if you're curious what would have hit your inbox.
I too have learnt how to read the most vital emails based on the heading. The rest are ignored.
Lesson to take home for me is that we have to make good headings for our blogs and posts.
Lady swans are having affairs! I would click on that one out of the two lol.
Yes I came across the issue but I fixed it by going to the bottom of the email and clicking on update preferences. I unchecked everything I am not interested in. And then I made a Wealthy Affiliate mailbox in my personal mail and set a rule to direct all email from WA into that mailbox and keep it from showing up in my regular inbox.
Once per day, usually in the morning, I run through the WA mailbox I set up, and then I clear it out after engaging in the content or at least looking at it. On the notification bell in WA, you can update those preferences too. All likes, comments on my comments, follows, and everything else is cleared during the same time as my emails and after, I leave it alone until the next morning so it doesn't distract me while I am learning the lessons or working on a website.
I hope that helps!
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We all learn pretty quickly that spending a disproportionate amount of time on WA notifications is counter productive to why we are here ... to develop an online business.
Kim has the rational answer below.