home › Safety › The main thing is to send a copy to the specified e-mail. Working with the fields “To” (“To”), “Cc” (“CC”), “Bcc” (“Bcc”). Send BCC

The main thing is to send a copy to the specified e-mail. Working with the fields “To” (“To”), “Cc” (“CC”), “Bcc” (“Bcc”). Send BCC

Good time! Today we will talk about SMS backup by sending all messages from your smartphone to email. This may be required both simply for the purpose of saving correspondence, and for further processing of messages, for example, searching messages for the necessary information (contacts, names, prices, etc.) by third-party applications, which in turn work with E-Mail. Let's look at an option for such copying using a smartphone running Android.

Create a mailbox

To send and save all messages by E-Mail, you first need to register a mailbox; mail from yandex.ru is perfect for this. You can also use your existing mailbox, but I recommend registering a new one. Firstly, over time, a large number of SMS messages will accumulate in it, which can interfere with working with regular letters, and secondly, if you connect your mailbox to a third-party service for analytics, do not indicate the login and password for the main E-Mail in it. .

Install the SMS Backup + application on your Android smartphone

To send all SMS messages to your mailbox, you will need to install and configure the special SMS Backup + application, which can be downloaded from play.goole.com or apk-dl.com (an alternative for smartphones that do not use Google Play) or.

The application has been tested on Android: 3.xx, 4.xx, 5.xx, 6.xx; Support for version 2.xx is declared.

Setting up SMS Backup +

Launch the application;
After launching the application, in the menu that opens, select the item: Advanced settings;
Next, go to Backup settings;
Check the boxes for Backup SMS and Email subject prefix, uncheck the boxes for Backup MMS, Backup Call log (we don’t need MMS and call history, although you can backup them too);
Return to the previous menu and go to the IMAP Server settings section;
Select the Authentication menu item,

set the parameter value to Plain text;
Select the Server address menu item, enter the value: imap.yandex.ru:993
Select the Security menu item and enter the value: SSL
Select the Login (You IMAP account) menu item, specify your login, then select the Password (You IMAP account password) menu item, specify the password for yandex.ru mail;
In the main menu, check the box for Auto backup;
Next, go to Auto backup settings, select the Regular schedule menu item and set the time interval at which SMS will be sent to the mailbox account we specified (for example, every 2 hours).

The SMS Backup + application allows you not only to make backup copies to E-Mail, but also to restore messages from it. The corresponding recovery settings can be found in the Advanced settings -> Restore settings section.

After sending messages by E-Mail, they will all be placed in a folder called: SMS.

Analyzing SMS sent to Email

After receiving a list of SMS messages to your email address, you can use special software to analyze the data they contain. For example, you can track SMS from the bank with messages about cash receipts and debits, based on which you can keep financial records automatically. I implemented a similar solution for a “joint shopping site”, when all SMS messages from the Bank received by the JV Organizers are collected in one place, analyzed and based on them, the system displays data in the control panel about which user who placed the order made the payment.

“It’s like the fairy tale about the boy who constantly cried wolf.” If you abuse the “urgent” tag, people will stop answering your emails. And a truly important letter may go unnoticed because of this.

Familiarity

Yes, the tone of your letter can reflect your relationship with the recipient. However, you may be considered unprofessional if you allow yourself to be too informal in your correspondence. Avoid excessive use of exclamation marks, emoticons, colored text, unusual fonts, and excessive brevity of messages.

Be especially careful if you work with people of different ages, with language barriers, or with those who prefer a more traditional form of communication.

Too dry tone

At the same time, being a robot is also not worth it. It's okay if you show your character or enthusiasm in your letters - within reasonable limits.

Reply All

Work email is not for entertainment, but for communication. So if you're replying to an email sent to a group of people, think twice before clicking "reply all." To do this, your answer must be extremely important to everyone.

Sending copies without permission

Sharing other people's information with others is, to say the least, impermissible. It doesn't matter whether you send a client a copy of a letter from your boss who responded to him in any way, or include one employee in personal correspondence with another. Few people might like it if you send a copy of a letter without their consent.

Send BCC

Sending BCC breeds mistrust. If you want to send a letter to someone, and this person, in theory, should not participate in work correspondence, copy the text and send it as a separate letter.

Unspecified email subject

Subjects like “It’s Me,” “Hello,” or “FYI” (FYI) simply don’t grab attention. The person will not understand what is being said and will not want to respond to the letter. Work-related letters should be clear and concise. The recipient is more likely to open the email if he understands what you want from him.

Sending too many personal emails

You can sometimes use jokes, touching stories and motivational quotes to cheer someone up. But people get tired of this quickly, no matter what your intentions were in writing them. If you send too many personal emails, they will simply be set to auto-deletion.

Be rude

You shouldn’t send letters full of poison, because people will remember it when the opportunity arises. Instead, write a letter and leave it in “Drafts” for two days. Then you can come back to it and edit it, removing the barbs. This way you will achieve what you want faster. In addition, you will be treated as a very patient and thoughtful professional.

Stupid email address

If you are sending an email to a client, employee, or potential employer, do not use email with an “unprofessional” title. If there is anything in the email title that purports to be witty or contains sexual or vulgar connotations (something like ), you run the risk of making the other person feel negative about you from the very beginning. Create a separate email for purely professional needs.

Typos

The fact that the email was sent from an iPhone is not an excuse for sending sloppy emails. If you make more than one mistake in your letter, it may be considered unprofessional. If this is a very important letter, and you are in a hurry to get somewhere, then try to at least check it before sending it.

Sending emails early in the morning

Most people, when receiving letters, look at the time they were sent. If the letter is sent too early, you may be viewed negatively. At the very least, you will be considered a workaholic with no personal life. It's worse if you are considered intrusive. If inspiration awakens you at night, write a letter, save it in “Drafts” and send it during working hours.

Too many punctuation marks

People sometimes get too carried away and use a lot of exclamation points. The result may seem immature or too emotional to some. Don't abuse it!!!

Non-professional fonts

The Purple Comic Sans font has its own scope. In business, it is better to use classic fonts, colors and sizes. Your letters should be easy to read.

Typically a font size of 10 or 12 is used. Easy-to-read fonts like Arial, Calibri or Times New Roman are best for the job. Preferable color is black.

Letter too long

Most people spend seconds, not minutes, reading emails. Many people simply skim over the text with their eyes, so write your letters based on this. People find it difficult to read large paragraphs - break the text into smaller blocks. Highlights and bulleted lists are much easier to read. You can also highlight the main points in bold or italics, but do not do this often.

Tamara Vorotyntseva – development director of the training company “BUSINESS PARTNER” (Moscow). Practicing business coach, author of the book “Building a Personnel Training System” and publications in business publications in Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. Creator of the Internet newsletter: “E-mail correspondence in business” on the subscribe.ru server! The book is a practical guide for business people who actively correspond with clients and partners. It presents tools that will help make electronic communication effective, optimal in time and results, and most compliant with the norms and rules accepted in the modern business community. The author gives practical advice, illustrates his observations with real-life cases, and provides reasoned conclusions. The text of the book is rich in recognizable examples of real business correspondence. The author shares his observations, techniques, and “tricks” that can significantly affect the effectiveness and efficiency of a business email. If you are a business person and it is important for you to write promptly, concisely, competently, in accordance with the rules of good business manners, this book will become your reliable assistant.

Book:

When working with the fields “To” (“To”), “Cc” (“CC”), “Bcc” (“Bcc”), remember that this is an important part of the email that affects the further actions of the participants in the correspondence.

“To whom” (“That”). This field contains the address of the recipient to whom the letter and the information contained in it are directly addressed. The author of the letter is waiting for a response from the main recipient. If two recipients are placed in this field, then the author of the letter is waiting for a response from each or some of them (keep this in mind if your name is on the list of recipients). At the same time (if you are the sender), keep in mind that it is not very advisable to include more than one addressee in the “To” (“To”) field. A letter sent to several recipients may not receive a single response, since each will think that the other will answer.

If the letter is addressed to you, but contains copies of other recipients, be sure to use the “Reply ALL” button when replying! This will allow you to maintain the circle of recipients that the initiator of the correspondence designated.

“Copy” (“Cs”). IN In this field, place the addresses of recipients who, in your opinion, should be aware of correspondence on this issue. These recipients receive information only “for your information.” The CC recipient usually does not have to respond to the letter, but can do so if necessary.

NOTE. IT IS IMPORTANT!

If your name is in the “Cc” (“CC”) field, then when entering into correspondence, remember that there are situations when it is extremely important to be polite. Use the phrases: “Let me join the discussion,” or “Let me join your dialogue,” or “Let me express my opinion.”

"Blind carbon copy" ("Bcc"). This field is prohibited for use in some companies, as it is a tool that contradicts ethical standards of communication. The purpose of this field is to invite the recipient to become a “secret witness.”

If your business practice is to use this field in your work, consider the following. The BCC recipient remains invisible to the primary recipient and the BCC recipients. Sometimes it is useful for the sender and the “secret recipient” to have a preliminary agreement (or subsequent awareness) about the reason and purpose of this method of information.

NOTE. IT IS IMPORTANT!

The “hidden” recipient should absolutely not enter into correspondence from this field.

One of the most popular functions on the site is the application or order form, the data from which is sent by email to the site owner. As a rule, such forms are simple and consist of two or three fields for data entry. How to create such an order form? This requires the use of HTML markup language and PHP programming language.

The HTML markup language itself is simple; you just need to figure out how and where to put certain tags. With the PHP programming language, things are a little more complicated.

For a programmer, creating such a form is not difficult, but for an HTML layout designer, some actions may seem difficult.

Create a data submission form in html

The first line will be as follows

This is a very important element of the form. In it we indicate how the data will be transferred and to which file. In this case, everything is transferred using the POST method to the send.php file. The program in this file must accordingly receive the data, it will be contained in the post array, and send it to the specified email address.

Let's get back to form. The second line will contain a field for entering your full name. Has the following code:

The form type is text, that is, the user will be able to enter or copy text here from the keyboard. The name parameter contains the name of the form. In this case, it is fio; it is under this name that everything that the user entered in this field will be transmitted. The placeholder parameter specifies what will be written in this field as an explanation.

Next line:

Here, almost everything is the same, but the name for the field is email, and the explanation is that the user enters his email address in this form.

The next line will be the "send" button:

And the last line in the form will be the tag

Now let's put everything together.

Now let's make the fields in the form mandatory. We have the following code:

Create a file that accepts data from the HTML form

This will be a file called send.php

In the file, at the first stage, you need to accept data from the post array. To do this, we create two variables:

$fio = $_POST["fio"];
$email = $_POST["email"];

Variable names in PHP are preceded by a $ sign, and a semicolon is placed at the end of each line. $_POST is an array into which data from the form is sent. In the html form, the sending method is specified as method="post". So, two variables from the html form are accepted. To protect your site, you need to pass these variables through several filters - php functions.

The first function will convert all the characters that the user will try to add to the form:

In this case, new variables are not created in php, but existing ones are used. What the filter will do is transform the character "<" в "<". Также он поступить с другими символами, встречающимися в html коде.

The second function decodes the URL if the user tries to add it to the form.

$fio = urldecode($fio);
$email = urldecode($email);

With the third function we will remove spaces from the beginning and end of the line, if any:

$fio = trim($fio);
$email = trim($email);

There are other functions that allow you to filter php variables. Their use depends on how concerned you are that an attacker will try to add program code to this html email submission form.

Validation of data transferred from HTML form to PHP file

In order to check whether this code works and whether data is being transferred, you can simply display it on the screen using the echo function:

echo $fio;
echo "
";
echo $email;

The second line here is needed to separate the output of php variables into different lines.

Sending received data from an HTML form to email using PHP

To send data by email, you need to use the mail function in PHP.

mail("to which address to send", "subject of the letter", "Message (body of the letter)","From: from which email the letter is sent \r\n");

For example, you need to send data to the email of the site owner or manager [email protected].

The subject of the letter should be clear, and the message of the letter should contain what the user specified in the HTML form.

mail(" [email protected]", "Application from the site", "Full name:".$fio.". E-mail: ".$email ,"From: [email protected]\r\n");

It is necessary to add a condition that will check whether the form was sent using PHP to the specified email address.

if (mail(" [email protected]", "Order from the site", "Full name:".$fio.". E-mail: ".$email ,"From: [email protected]\r\n"))
{
echo "message sent successfully";
) else (
}

Thus, the program code of the send.php file, which will send the HTML form data to email, will look like this:

$fio = $_POST["fio"];
$email = $_POST["email"];
$fio = htmlspecialchars($fio);
$email = htmlspecialchars($email);
$fio = urldecode($fio);
$email = urldecode($email);
$fio = trim($fio);
$email = trim($email);
//echo $fio;
//echo "
";
//echo $email;
if (mail(" [email protected]", "Application from the site", "Full name:".$fio.". E-mail: ".$email ,"From: [email protected]\r\n"))
( echo "message sent successfully";
) else (
echo "errors occurred while sending the message";
}?>

Three lines to check if the data is being transferred to the file are commented out. If necessary, they can be removed, since they were needed only for debugging.

We place the HTML and PHP code for submitting the form in one file

In the comments to this article, many people ask the question of how to make sure that both the HTML form and the PHP code for sending data to email are in one file, and not two.

To implement this work, you need to place the HTML code of the form in the send.php file and add a condition that will check for the presence of variables in the POST array (this array is sent from the form). That is, if the variables in the array do not exist, then you need to show the user the form. Otherwise, you need to receive data from the array and send it to the recipient.

Let's see how to change the PHP code in the send.php file:

Application form from the site

//check if variables exist in the POST array
if(!isset($_POST["fio"]) and !isset($_POST["email"]))(
?>

) else (
//show the form
$fio = $_POST["fio"];
$email = $_POST["email"];
$fio = htmlspecialchars($fio);
$email = htmlspecialchars($email);
$fio = urldecode($fio);
$email = urldecode($email);
$fio = trim($fio);
$email = trim($email);
if (mail(" [email protected]", "Application from the site", "Full name:".$fio.". E-mail: ".$email ,"From: [email protected]\r\n"))(
echo "Message sent successfully";
) else (
echo "Errors occurred while sending the message";
}
}
?>

We check the existence of a variable in the POST array with the isset() PHP function. An exclamation mark before this function in a condition means negation. That is, if the variable does not exist, then we need to show our form. If I had not put an exclamation point, the condition would literally mean “if exists, then show the form.” And this is wrong in our case. Naturally, you can rename it to index.php. If you rename the file, do not forget to rename the file name in the line

. The form should link to the same page, for example index.php. I added the page title to the code.

Common errors that occur when submitting a PHP form from a website

The first, probably the most popular mistake, is when you see a blank white page with no messages. This means that you made an error in the page code. You need to enable display of all errors in PHP and then you will see where the error was made. Add to the code:

ini_set("display_errors","On");
error_reporting("E_ALL");

The send.php file must only be run on the server, otherwise the code simply will not work. It is advisable that this is not a local server, since it is not always configured to send data to an external mail server. If you run the code not on the server, then the PHP code will be displayed directly on the page.

Thus, for correct operation, I recommend placing the send.php file on the site hosting. As a rule, everything is already configured there.

Another common mistake is when the “Message sent successfully” notification appears, but the letter does not arrive in the mail. In this case, you need to carefully check the line:

if (mail(" [email protected]", "Order from the site", "Full name:".$fio.". E-mail: ".$email ,"From: [email protected]\r\n"))

Instead of [email protected] there must be an email address to which the letter should be sent, but instead[email protected] must be an existing email for this site. For example, for a website this will be . Only in this case a letter with the data from the form will be sent.

What is email? In the modern business world this is:

Your face. It is with the help of email that you can create a positive image in the eyes of the counterparty or spoil the first impression.
Your working tool. A lot of communication with the outside world takes place via email. Therefore, if you are proficient in this instrument, you can make your life a lot easier.
A powerful distraction. The outside world is trying to get at you, distract you and lead you astray through email.

From this perspective, let’s look at working with email. Let's start with something simple.

Formatting a letter

I use the Mozilla Thunderbird email client, so I will use it as an example. Let's create a new letter and go from top to bottom through the list of fields.

To whom. Copy. Hidden copy

Some may not know, but "To" in Mozilla can be changed to "Cc" or "Bcc".

To whom: we write the main recipient or several recipients separated by a semicolon.
Copy: we write to someone who should read the letter, but from whom we do not expect a reaction.
Hidden copy: we are writing to someone who should read the letter, but should remain unknown to the other recipients of the letter. It is especially appropriate to use for mass mailing of business letters, such as notifications.

Wrong in mass mailings, indicate recipients using the “Copy” or “To” fields. Several times a year I receive letters that list 50–90 recipients in the “Cc” field. There is a violation of privacy. Not all of your recipients need to know who else you are working with on a similar topic. It’s good if these are people who know each other. What if there are competing companies on the list that don’t know about each other? At a minimum, you need to be prepared for unnecessary explanations, and at maximum, to terminate cooperation with one of them. Do not do it this way.

Letter subject

Professional mailing services often write (sometimes sensibly) about the importance of the email subject line on their corporate blogs. But most often we are talking about sales letters, where the subject of the letter solves the problem “the email should be opened.”

We are discussing daily business correspondence. Here the theme solves the problem “the letter and its author should be easily identified and then found.” Moreover, your diligence will return to you in the form of karma of numerous response letters, only with prefixes Re: or FWD, among which you will have to look for the desired letter on the topic.

Twenty letters is the volume of one-day correspondence for a middle manager. I’m not talking about entrepreneurs and business owners at all; their number of letters sometimes goes off scale at 200 or more per day. Therefore once again: do not send emails with an empty subject.

So, how to formulate the subject line of an email correctly?

Mistake #1 : Only the company name in the subject. For example, “Sky” and that’s it. Firstly, you are probably not the only one from your company communicating with this counterparty. Secondly, such a topic does not bring any meaning, because the name of your company is already visible from the address. Thirdly, guess what your own mailbox will look like with this approach to correspondence? Something like this.

Is it convenient to search on such topics?

Mistake #2 : flashy, selling headline. It's great if you know how to write such headlines. But is it appropriate to use these skills in business correspondence? Remember the purpose of a business email subject line: not to sell, but to provide identification and search.

Text of the letter

There are many writing guides for different occasions. For example, Maxim Ilyakhov, Alexander Amzin and other masters of words have a lot of useful information. I advise you to read their articles, at least to improve general literacy and improve the overall style of written speech.

In the process of writing a letter, we must make several decisions sequentially.

A matter of politeness . At the beginning of the letter, you can blur into pleasantries or even tenderness in the spirit of “My dear Rodya, it’s been more than two months since I talked to you in writing, from which I myself suffered and even didn’t sleep some nights, thinking.” Very polite and very costly, both in terms of time to write such an introduction, and in terms of the interlocutor’s time to read it. Correspondence is business, remember? Not an essay in the epistolary genre for a competition or a letter to Raskolnikov’s mother, but business correspondence.

We respect our time and the recipient's!

It only makes sense to introduce yourself and recall the circumstances of your acquaintance in the first letter sent after a fleeting meeting at an exhibition. If this is a continuation of cooperation or ongoing correspondence, in the first letter of the day we write: “Hello, Ivan”, in the second and subsequent ones: “Ivan, ...”.

Appeal . I have always been concerned about the question of who to address in a letter if there are several recipients. Recently I wrote a letter addressed to three girls named Anna. Without any doubt, I wrote “Hello, Anna” and didn’t worry. But such luck is not always the case.

What if there are three or even seven recipients and they do not have the same name? You can list them by name: “Good afternoon, Rodion, Pulcheria, Avdotya and Pyotr Petrovich.” But it's long and takes time. You can write: “Hello, colleagues!”

For myself, I use the rule of addressing by name the person in the “To” field. And don’t contact those in the copy at all. This rule also allows you to more accurately determine (one!) the addressee of the letter and the purpose of this letter.

Citation . Often correspondence is a chain of letters with questions and answers - in a word, a dialogue. It is considered good practice not to delete the correspondence history and write your response at the top of the quoted text, so that when you return to this correspondence a week later, you can easily read the dialogue from top to bottom, descending by date.

For some reason, the default setting in Mozilla is “Place cursor after quoted text.” I recommend changing it in the “Tools” → “Account Options” → “Composing and Addressing” menu. It must be so.

Purpose of the letter . There are two types of business letters:

when we simply inform the interlocutor (for example, a report on the work done for the month);
and when we want something from the interlocutor. For example, so that he approves the attached invoice for payment.

As a rule, there are many times more encouraging letters than reporting letters. If we want to achieve something from the interlocutor, it is very important to say this in a letter in plain text. The call to action should be accompanied by a name and be the last sentence in the letter.

Wrong : “Porfiry Petrovich, I know who hacked the old woman to death.”

Right : “Porfiry Petrovich, it was I who hacked the old woman to death, please take measures to arrest me, I’m tired of suffering!”

Why should the correspondent think for you what to do with this letter? After all, he may make the wrong decision.

Signature in the text . She must be. Moreover, all email clients allow you to configure automatic signature substitution, for example the classic “Sincerely, …”. In Mozilla, this is done in the “Tools” → “Account Options” menu.

Whether or not to write contacts in the signature is a personal matter for everyone. But if you are in any way connected with sales, be sure to write. Even if the deal does not take place as a result of communication, in the future you will be easily found using the contacts from the signature.

Finally, one more feature of the letter body for those interlocutors who don’t like (can’t, don’t want, don’t have time) to answer your letters. Please indicate the default in the body of the letter. For example, “Porfiry Petrovich, if you don’t come to arrest me before 12:00 Friday, then I consider myself amnestied.” Of course, the deadline must be real (you shouldn’t send the text from the example on Friday at 11:50). The recipient must be physically able to read and act on your letter. Such “silence” relieves you of responsibility for the interlocutor’s failure to respond. As always, you need to approach the use of this feature wisely. If a person responds to your letters on time and regularly, such an ultimatum may, if not offend him, then stress him out a little or lead to a decision not to answer the letter right now, but to force you to wait until Friday.

Attachments

Letters often come with attachments: resumes, commercial proposals, estimates, schedules, scans of documents - a very convenient tool and at the same time a source of popular errors.

Error : huge investment size. I often receive emails with attachments up to 20 MB in size. As a rule, these are scans of some documents in TIFF format, with a resolution of 600dpi. The correspondent's email program will almost certainly freeze for several minutes in a futile attempt to load a preview of the attachment. And God forbid the recipient tries to read this letter on a smartphone...

Personally, I immediately delete such letters. Don't want your email to end up in the trash before it's read? Check the size of the investment. It is recommended that it be no more than 3 MB.

What to do if it exceeds?

Try reconfiguring your scanner to a different format and resolution. For example, PDF and 300dpi produce quite readable scans.
Think about programs such as WinRar or 7zip archiver. Some files compress perfectly.
What to do if the attachment is huge and you can’t compress it? For example, an almost empty accounting database weighs 900 MB. Cloud information storage will come to the rescue: Dropbox, Google Drive and the like. Some services, such as Mail.ru, automatically convert huge attachments into links to cloud storage. But I prefer to manage my information stored in the cloud myself, so I don’t welcome automation from Mail.ru.

And one more not entirely obvious recommendation about investments - their Name . It must be understandable and acceptable to the recipient. Once we in the company were preparing a commercial proposal in the name of... let it be Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. I received a letter from the manager with a draft CP for approval, and the attachment included a file named “ForFedi.docx”. The manager who sent me this had a dialogue that went something like this:

Dear manager, are you personally ready to approach this respected man and call him Fedya to his face?

Somehow, no, he’s a respected man, everyone calls him by his first name and patronymic.

Why did you name the attachment “For Fedi”? If I send it to him right now, do you think he will buy axes from us using this CP?

I was going to rename it later...

Why prepare a time bomb - the refusal of a potential client - or create extra work for yourself by renaming the file? Why not immediately name the attachment correctly: “For Fyodor Mikhailovich.docx” or even better - “KP_Sky_Axes.docx”.

So, we have more or less sorted out email as a “face”. Let's move on to looking at email as a tool for effective work and talk about its distraction component.

Working with letters

Email is a powerful distraction. As with any distraction, email needs to be dealt with by tightening rules and introducing work schedules.

At a minimum, you need to turn off ALL notifications about mail arrivals. If the email client is configured by default, you will be notified with a sound signal, an icon next to the clock will blink, and a preview of the letter will be shown. In a word, they will do everything to first tear you away from painstaking work, and then plunge you into the abyss of unread letters and unviewed mailings - minus an hour or two from your life.

Some people have powerful willpower that allows them not to be distracted by notifications, but ordinary people are better off not tempting fate and turning them off. In Mozilla Thunderbird, this is done through the menu "Tools" → "Settings" → "General" → "When new messages appear."

If there are no notifications, how can you understand that a letter has arrived?

Very simple. You yourself, consciously, set aside time to sort through your mail, open your email client and see all the unread messages. This can be done twice a day, for example, at lunch and in the evening, or during forced downtime, for example, in traffic jams.

People often ask, what about response times and urgent letters? I answer: you do not have urgent letters in your mail. Unless you work in the customer support department (this department has its own rules for working with mail).

If there are urgent letters, the sender will notify you about this through other channels - telephone, SMS, Skype. Then you will consciously go into your email client and process urgent mail. All time management gurus (for example, Gleb Arkhangelsky with his “Time Drive”) declare a standard response to email within 24 hours. This is a normal rule of good manners - do not expect instant replies via email from your interlocutor. If there is an urgent letter, notify about it through faster communication channels.

So, we turned off notifications and now turn on the email client according to our schedule.

What to do when we go to the mail and engage in an activity called “sorting out email”? Where is the beginning and end of this work?

I've heard a lot about the zero inbox system, but, unfortunately, I haven't met a single person using it. I had to reinvent my wheel. There are articles on this topic on Lifehacker. For example, " ". Below I will talk about the zero inbox system in my interpretation. I would be grateful if GTD gurus would comment and add or improve the described system.

It is important to understand and accept that email is not a task scheduler or archive for your activities. Therefore, the Inbox folder should always be empty. Once you start sorting through your inbox, don't stop or be distracted by anything until you've emptied this folder.

What to do with emails in your inbox? You need to go through each letter sequentially and delete it. Yes, just highlight and press Delete on your keyboard. If you can’t bring yourself to delete the letter, you’ll have to decide what to do with it.

Can you answer it in three minutes? Do I need to answer it? Yes, it is necessary, and the answer will take no more than three minutes, then answer immediately.
You must answer, but preparing an answer will take more than three minutes. If you use a task scheduler that allows you to convert an email into a task, turn the email into a task and forget about it for a while. For example, I use the absolutely wonderful service Doit.im. It allows you to generate a personal email address: you forward the letter to it, and it turns into a task. But if you don’t have a task scheduler, move the letter to the “0_Run” subfolder.
After quickly replying to a letter, turning it into a task, or simply reading it, you need to decide what to do with this message next: delete it or send it to one of the folders for long-term storage.

Here are the long-term storage folders I have.

0_Execute. I don’t have such a folder, but if you don’t have a planner, I repeat, you can put letters that require detailed work here. This folder also needs to be cleaned regularly, but with a thoughtful approach at a time specially allocated for this.
1_Ref. Here I put letters with background information: welcome letters with logins from various web services, tickets for upcoming flights, and so on.
2_Projects. An archive of correspondence on partners and projects with which there are current relationships is stored here. Naturally, a separate folder has been created for each project or partner. In the partner’s folder I put letters not only from his employees, but also letters from Neb employees related to this partner. Very convenient: if necessary, all correspondence on the project is at hand in a couple of clicks.
3_Museum. This is where I put those letters that it would be a pity to delete, and the benefit of them is not obvious. Also, folders with closed projects from “2_Projects” migrate here. In short, the “Museum” stores the first candidates for removal.
4_Documents. Here are letters with electronic samples of documents that may be useful in the future for accounting, for example, reconciliation reports from clients, tickets for trips taken. The folder has many similarities with the “2_Projects” and “1_Reference” folders, only accounting information is stored in it, and management information is stored in the “2_Projects” folder. In “4_Documents” there is dead information, and in “2_Projects” there is live information.
5_Knowledge. Here I only put really useful newsletters that I want to return to after a while for inspiration or to find solutions.

There are other email client settings that are important for the operation of this system. First, by default in Thunderbird there is a “Mark messages as read” checkbox. I prefer to do this consciously, so down with the flag! To do this, go to the menu “Tools” → “Settings” → “Advanced” → “Reading and Display”.

Secondly, we use filters . Previously, I actively used filters that automatically forwarded letters to the appropriate folders based on the sender's address. For example, letters from a lawyer were moved to the “Lawyer” folder. I abandoned this approach for several reasons. First: letters from a lawyer in 99% of cases relate to some project or partner, which means they must be moved to the folder of this partner or project. Second: I decided to add awareness. You yourself must decide where a specific letter should be stored, and it is more convenient to look for unprocessed messages in only one place - in the inbox. Now I use filters only for organizing automatic regular letters from various systems into folders, that is, letters that do not require me to make decisions. Filters in Mozilla Thunderbird are configured in the menu “Tools” → “Message Filters”.

So, with the right approach, email should take from 10 to 60 minutes a day, depending on the volume of correspondence.

Yes, and one more thing. Have you already turned off notifications about the arrival of new letters? ;)

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