Organizing Your Email Can Help Your Genealogy Research

Many people have one email address that they use for absolutely everything. It doesn’t take long for that inbox to get filled with emails from a variety of sources. When this happens, it becomes difficult to find the emails that relate to genealogy and sort them out from the rest. Organizing your email can help your genealogy research.

Get a New Email Address
One simple way to keep your email organized is to get a brand new email address. Use that email address for all of your genealogy related emails. The new email address is the one you will use to sign up for genealogy newsletters.

Use the new email address to send email to yourself about things you want to research (when you have the time). Check to see if the genealogy websites you are using can switch from your original email address to your new one. Connect your genealogy blog to this email so comments will go to this inbox instead of your regular one.

This technique is one that couponers use all the time. It works because it automatically organizes all of the emails that relate to one topic into one inbox. You can ignore that email’s inbox until you are ready to do some research without having to worry about missing anything important.

Achieve “Inbox Zero”
The goal for “Inbox Zero” is to go through all of your email and end up with zero email in your inbox. To achieve this, you have to make choices and avoid leaving things for later. One way to get rid of email is to respond to it. Reply to the comment someone left on a post on your genealogy blog – and then delete the email.

Another option is to quickly delete emails. For example, let’s say you get an email in your new genealogy email inbox that is selling something. Is that product or service something you can buy today? Is it something you actually want or need? If not – delete the email and move on.

What about the emails you sent yourself with links to things you want to research? The easiest way to get rid of those emails is to open the link and bookmark it. Make a folder in your bookmarks called “Genealogy”. The folder makes it easy to find those links when you are ready to do some research.

Check the Spam Folder
Your email account will have a spam folder. Usually, it does a good job of filtering out the “junk” from the email that you actually want to see. Once in a while, a good email can end up stuck in the spam folder. Don’t click on any links from emails that seem questionable.

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