by David Danoff

In our last edition we asked you to respond to a quick survey on email. We've tallied the responses and published them below.

How much time do you spend on email each day? Survey says: 39% spend less than 1 hour. Another 39% reported spending between 1 and 2 hours, and 22% spend more than 2 hours every day on their email.

How much email do you receive each day? The majority of the respondents reported that they receive between 11 and 50 emails a day (70%), with an additional 20% reporting 10 or fewer. 10% receive more than 50 messages a day, but no one reported more than 100 messages. (Maybe the people who do receive that many were too busy reading and answering them all to respond to our survey!)

Do you effectively manage your email? 75% percent reported that they handle their email effectively, with the other 25% admitting they "sometimes" handle it effectively.

Among tips we received for more effective email management, the most common one was: "Sort messages into folders and delete often." Respondents also recommended answering, filing, or deleting most emails immediately in order to keep the inbox clear. This follows the old organizational rule of managing large amounts of paper mail: "handle a piece of paper just once." Some people are quicker than others to use the delete key: "If it's what I recognize as junk mail, I just delete it without opening it. If I don't recognize the sender and I think it's junk, I just delete it."

In order to limit the number of incoming emails, one person suggested "removing your name from all but the most important mailing lists" and another person advised the use of "mail filters" to keep unwanted messages away from the active inbox.

And, finally, as one prudent person reminded us: "Exercise email hygiene!" Be careful about opening any binary attachments you receive via email, especially ones from people you don't know or which seem to have been forwarded to a great many people, since they might contain viruses.

Here are tips from our readers:

"Respond immediately and file or delete when done."

"Avoid opening an attachment that has been shared by many people and requires downloading to your hard drive. Chances are it's infected with a virus. Exercise email hygiene!"

"Remove your name from all but the most important mailing lists."

"I am very careful composing subject headings so that, referring to it later, I can easily remember the content of the message without having to open it."

"I use email reading as a break from the more stressful parts of my job."

"Check it only during certain times of day; remove emails from the inbox as you go."

"I use mail filters to presort my email."

"Keep messages filed in personal folders & subfolders under project/subject headings."

"Don't read known junk - just delete it."

Visit http://www.helpdesk.umd.edu/topics/email/ to learn more about handling email, attachments, viruses, setting up mail filters and folders, and more.

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