If you do any volume of business on the Internet, the number of emails you will need to deal with will definitely increase. Every six months I build up over 10,000 emails in my inbox alone and that doesn't count the ones I have either manually or automatically shuttled to a folder and it doesn't count the many, many, many pieces of spam that I delete.

When I need to find one of these emails, I need to find it fast and it would be totally impossible to sift through them manually. This is where the find / search function of your email program comes into play.

I use Microsoft Outlook as my main email program. You may have to adjust if you use another program and if you are using older versions of AOL, forget it. They don't have a search function. I haven't upgraded to AOL 8.0 yet, but they claim to have a way to sort email now, but I still didn't see a "search" function. I'll let you know about that after I upgrade.

For quick finds in Outlook (I use this 99% of the time), you have to know something that might be in the email address or the subject line. I just tried searching on the CC line and it would not work. I'm using Outlook 2000 and I doubt if they've changed this in newer versions.

DON'T MAKE THIS BIG MISTAKE
This drives me crazy when I do this and I can do nothing but sit around and wait it out. The mistake is checking the box that says "Search all text in the message." Yes, I must use this sometime, but if you want a quick search and you have 10,000 emails in your inbox you are in for a several minute wait which feels like an eternity when you're busy.

Sometimes you have no choice, but to search all the text in the message because all you can remember about the email is that Joe Schmoe's name is in the body of the message somewhere. You can't remember the email address of who sent it and you can't remember words that may be in the subject line. So, you search all the text in the message on the name "schmoe" and wait it out. If you have lots of emails in your box, only use this method as a last resort.

Either one of the quick find or the "Search all the text in the message" functions work on sub folders, sent folders or the delete folder and normally go lots faster because there are normally only a tiny fraction of your total number of emails in any one folder.

ADVANCED FIND
If you want to do a very specific search and want to narrow down the emails that need searched through you can use the advanced find. You get here by clicking "find" and then "advanced find" in the upper right hand corner of the find box.

Let's say you knew that the email you were looking for was received last November and that the name "Schmoe" was in it. You can get very specific using the advanced find to narrow your search and find what you want really fast and that's what automation is all about.




More automation techniques:

• Set up your "autocorrect" in world. If you aren't using ShortKeys as I talked about in past issue, then use your "autocorrect" function of Microsoft Word to automatically type long phrases. Click on "tools" then "autocorrect" put some kind of identifier/abbreviation in the "replace" box and put the long string of text in the "with" box. Every time you type the abbreviation and then hit enter the long string of text will pop in automatically saving you tons of typing.

• Get really comfortable with "ctrl-C" and "ctrl-V" in Windows programs. These are the copy and paste commands and using them over time will save you thousands and thousands of clicks by doing it the long way.

Upcoming topics for this section

• Using Bots

• Organize your email

• Reduce the impact of SPAM email

• The greatest keyboard shortcuts

• Respond to emails while you sleep with autoresponders

• Using templates so you never have to reinvent the wheel

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