Control the Emails Received on Your BlackBerry

Is your BlackBerry being overwhelmed by emails (newsletters etc) that you only need to read on a real computer? Do you need a way to receive these emails on your computer but NOT receive them on your BlackBerry?

Recently, I discussed increasing productivity by diverting newsletters etc out of the Outlook Inbox to a dedicated folder ... a folder that you can look at later at your leisure.

To stay productive, it is also important to stop unnecessary emails from being delivered to your BlackBerry.

There are two options for doing this.

Option 1: Use a non-BlackBerry email address to subscribe to newsletters and groups
This only applies for new newsletters or if you are willing to go and change your email address for all the groups, newsletters etc you are already part of. If not … take a look at Option 2 further down.

It's easy to get yourself a 2nd (or 10th email address if you want) using the free email offerings from Google, Yahoo etc.

Get yourself one of those email accounts and use that for any newsletters etc that you want to subscribe to.

Option 2: Configure your BlackBerry to filter out newsletter and group emails

Your BlackBerry comes with an online service that lets you configure exactly what gets delivered to your BlackBerry. It is very easy to use this to filter out (i.e NOT DELIVER TO YOUR PHONE) any unnecessary emails.

The emails will still go to your computer … but they'll no longer clog up your BlackBerry. Let's get started ...

Your service provider should have provided you with a URL to use with your BlackBerry. You should also have a username and password.

Logon to the website using the username and password to display the Email Accounts tab.



Click on the Filters icon on the appropriate email account line.



Click Add a Filter.



Enter all relevant information and then click Add Filter again.

You can now logout from the BlackBerry website.

Provided that you have entered the Filter information properly, you should have stopped a lot of unnecessary information from getting to your BlackBerry.

Benefits:

1. You become much more productive with your BlackBerry
2. You'll find that the BlackBerry's battery will last longer since it won't be downloading so much stuff now.

Deleting Email Addresses from Outlook's Auto Complete List

Whenever you type an email address in the To/CC/BCC field of an email, Outlook helps out by showing you a list of email addresses that match what you have typed. This can be very helpful in quickly entering a recipient's email address. But ...

People's email addresses change or you may have stopped communicating with certain people - yet their old email addresses keep showing up in the list.

Deleting Single Entries
It's easy to delete individual items from the list. Type a few characters in the To field to display the list. Then use the arrow keys on the keyboard to move to the old email addresses and click Delete.

Deleting the Whole List
Use with Caution because there is no way of getting the list back!
You can also completely delete the list to start from a clean slate by following the steps in this link:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287623/en-us

How to Avoid Sending Emails to the WRONG person

This happened to me yesterday. I used Outlook's auto-complete feature to select an email address while addressing my email and selected the wrong person. I ended up sending the email to completely the wrong person.

My Outlook is configured to send out emails automatically and I wasn't able to stop it ... although I realised my mistake within seconds of clicking Send.

Luckily for me, the content of the email wasn't confidential so there was no real damage done. But things could have been worse ...

Here are two ways to avoid this problem.

Option 1: Disable the Send Immediately function (not my preferred option).

You can setup Outlook to only send out emails according to your preset schedule or when you click Send&Receive.

To turn off automatic sends:

Click Tools-Options.
Click Mail Setup.
Remove the tick next to "Send immediately when connected"

Option 2: Delay all outgoing emails in your Outbox for (say) 30 seconds - this is what I have now implemented

It is possible to do this manually but it has to be done for every email you write … I am way to lazy for a manual solution ... it's not going to happen.

Instead I use the Delay Guard feature in SendGuard 4 Outlook to delay all my outgoing emails by 30 seconds. The settings screen is shown below.



I have set it up so that it asks me if I want the email delayed whenever I click Send (if you find the message intrusive, just remove one tick on the settings screen for all emails to be automatically delayed without the message)




Why 30 seconds? I find that I realise within 30 seconds of clicking Send if there's something wrong with the email I just sent. After 30 seconds I've moved on to something else and the email would have been sent out anway.