Email Shortcuts and Management Skills

The Importance of Regular Maintainence

Without regular maintenance, an email account can become clogged with old messages and junk mail. Many webmail accounts have limits to how much can accumulate. When you reach your storage limits, new mail may be rejected.

Obviously, you won't want to keep everything in your inbox. You will want to create some folders and move mail into these folders after you have read it.

Creating Folders to Manage Archived Email

You might want to consider creating a separate folder for this online course and move class correspondence into this folder. You might also want to consider creating a separate folder for each month.

Check your email client's Help files for specific information on how to create folders and how to move messages from your inbox and outbox into these folders.

Printing Email

Sometimes it is good to have hard copy of important email messages. Some email clients offer a Printable Format option that will print only the message and not all of the other items on the screen and/or the message headers.

Copy and Paste Text

Sometimes you just need to print a small portion of the message text. With the message visible on the screen, select the text that you want to copy.

If you are using a Windows computer and just want to print the selected text, select Print from the File menu and look for Selection in the Page Range section of the print dialog box. Select that option and click the Print button.

If you are using a Mac computer (or if you want to move the text to a word processing document with a Windows computer), select copy from the web browser's Edit menu, open a word processor document and select Paste from the word processor's Edit menu. Print the message.

Deleting Messages

As mentioned earlier, it is a good idea to periodically delete messages that you no longer need. If you do that on a regular basis as you read your mail, your webmail account will be less cluttered and may even be faster.

Next: Embedding Web Links in Email Messages