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Email has become one of the most common methods of communication, and often the easiest and quickest. This can have its downsides. You open up your inbox to find a flood of spam (pills, potions and watches), scam (millions of pounds/dollars are yours), pointless offices emails (just to let you know..........) and forwarded jokes. Sometimes, if you are lucky, you receive real emails.

In a busy work or home environment this email overload is time consuming and frustrating and important emails can easily be overlooked. For the sake of your sanity here are a few simple tips to help you cope with your email and sort the wood from the trees.

1) Use a junk mail filter. There are many on offer. Windows Mail (comes with Windows Vista) has a built-in filter. Some anti-virus suites offer a junk mail filter. Some email providers offer a junk mail filter. Whichever option you choose remember to check the junk mail folder from time to time. No junk mail filter is 100% reliable 100% of the time and you don't want to miss important emails. With a filter in place you need only read through the junk once a day to ensure you haven't missed a real email, and don't need to waste time laboriously deleting each junk email from your inbox.

2) Before you send an email - ask yourself if it is really necessary. Especially important in a busy work environment where a lot of the emails you receive are just background noise. Do you read all the emails your colleagues send you? If the answer is no - stop and ask yourself if you really think that your colleagues read all the emails you send them. If you think they don't, then you are probably sending too many.

3) Be careful when addressing an email to multiple recipients. ALWAYS use bcc (blind carbon copy) unless you truly want each recipient to know who else the message has been sent to. Putting all email addresses in the "to" or "cc" fields is at best annoying and at worst a breach of data protection and confidentiality. You might have permission to use someone's email address, but do you have permission to send it to others?

4) Remember the old adage - KISS. Keep it Simple (stupid). For work a short message is usually all that is needed. Don't write an essay when a short sentence will do. Busy colleagues will only skim read at best or might ignore long emails altogether.

As with all rules, there are exceptions. If you are writing a friendly, newsy letter to a friend or relative they will probably be really

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