For a few months now I’ve been an evangelist for the Inbox Zero philosophy.
Inbox Zero is all about keeping your inbox clear by dealing with e-mail quickly and – above all – efficiently.
One of the key lessons I’ve learned along the way is probably one of the simplest: to avoid e-mail clutter, make sure nothing redundant gets into your inbox in the first place.
That hotel mailing list you signed up for by accident? Those offers you get sent every week by that e-tailer you used a year ago? Don’t delete each one by hand – instead, take a moment to unsubscribe once and for all.
So far, so good. But the real power in attaining e-mail Zen can be found in filters – or as MS Outlook calls them, rules.
At work I belong to dozens of distribution lists. Some are 100% useful. Some are partly useful but need human intervention to sort the wheat from the chaff. Rules can’t help with those.
There are several d-lists, however, which regularly send me messages of a predictable nature which will never be relevant to me. And given enough predictability, even a dumb old computer can figure out what’s important (i.e. needs to land in my inbox) versus what isn’t (i.e. needs sticking into a folder, or just deleting altogether so it never troubles me).
Over the last few weeks I’ve slowly been accumulating these automated rules.
Some are simple (if an e-mail arrives with subject line “x”, delete it immediately). Some are more complicated (if an e-mail arrives from address “y” whose subject isn’t “z”, forward it to a chosen person, move it to a selected folder and mark it as read).
The result is that my work inbox has been gradually, perceptibly quietening down. The important stuff is still there, clear as day. But the noise is receding.
Sometimes there’s a curveball which means I have to fine-tune my filters. Maybe person B has sent out an irrelevant e-mail which person A normally sends out. No problem – just edit the appropriate rule accordingly.
This process has continued to the point where – as of this morning – I had 27 rules diligently working away on my inbox, around the clock.
Today, I tried to add the 28th. And got this message from Outlook:
One or more rules could not be uploaded to Exchange Server and have been deactivated. This could be because some of the parameters are not supported or there is insufficient space to store all of your rules.
Confused, I searched Outlook Help for assistance. I found this:
The storage limit for your rules is 32 KB. If the total size of your rules exceeds this limit, some rules may be disabled. To reduce the size of your rules, do one or more of the following:
- Delete rules you don’t need.
- Combine rules when possible. For example, if more than one rule moves messages to the same folder, combine the rules.
- Use a shorter name for your rules.
- If one of your rules moves e-mail messages to a Personal Folders file (.pst), move the .pst file to a location that has a shorter path. For example, instead of using C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\MyFolder.pst, use C:\MyFolder.pst.
What?!
This is the stupidest thing I’ve read in a very long time.
I’m using the world’s more prevalent enterprise e-mail solution (Outlook/Exchange). My archived e-mail alone clocks up 1.03GB.
And I have to arse about changing the names of my rules, moving my archive folder somewhere with a shorter path, or – the most likely option – deleting rules and forgetting about adding new ones altogether… because Microsoft has allocated an arbitrary fixed limit for rules which is lower than the RAM of my 1982 ZX Spectrum?
Pathetic.
I gather, from searching online, that there’s no patch or workaround for this – at least not without installing third-party add-ons (and that’s never going to happen in a locked-down IT environment).
Thanks, Outlook 2003, for preventing me from properly streamlining my inbox and working more effectively. You suck.
