A while ago I realized something interesting: most of the email that I receive is automated junk. I am on a number of mailing lists and I am a member of a many different websites. These organizations are always sending me notifications, reminders, updates, and more, but most of the time I’d rather ignore their emails. How can I make sure that only ‘real’ emails are getting to my inbox?

Before I talk about my approach to solving this problem, an important distinction needs to be made between spam and bacn (pronounced ‘bacon’). Spam messages are unsolicited, unwelcome emails that usually contain offensive content and/or try to sell you something. Bacn messages are solicited emails, sent automatically by a computer, that contain little or no important information. Since I signed up for those mailing lists and websites at some point in the past, my junk email is mostly bacn, not spam.

Fortunately, since I’m a Gmail user, I don’t have to deal with spam very often. Gmail’s filters do a great job of filtering it out of my inbox and into the spam folder. So all I have to worry about it the bacn, and here’s my new strategy:

1. Unsubscribe. Many of the email lists that I’m attached to are no longer relevant to me. Fortunately, many bacn emails have an “unsubscribe” link somewhere near the bottom, so I can using those to reduce the amount of mail coming into my account.
2. Categorize. The tricky part about bacn is that some messages are occassionally useful. Once in a while I need to find a specific piece of information that was sent to me in a bacn message. This involves digging through my All Mail folder and wasting a lot of time searching for that particular message. If the bacn is categorized by sender, this search process is much more simple. To achieve this kind of categorization, I’m in the process of creating filters that apply labels to each incoming message. The goal is to assign a label to each piece of bacn that comes in. That way, if an email doesn’t have a bacn label, I know it’s a ‘real’ message.
3. Hide. Once all of my mail is labeled, it will be easy to create a rule to automatically hide the bacn from view. Most of the time I don’t need to read any bacn messages when they come in, so selecting “Skip the Inbox” from the filter options will route them directly to the archive.
4. Delete. Even if I can reduce the amount of incoming bacn, categorize the messages that still come in, and hide them from view, they still make my All Mail folder more cluttered. Occasionally, I might go through my bacn labels and delete the messages that I’m sure I’ll never need. This is a bit risky (and actually unnecessary considering the amount of storage that Gmail provides), but it will give me more peace of mind and organization in the long run.

It would be nice to get to the point where every new email that comes to my inbox is a ‘real’ piece of mail. Bacn isn’t evil, but it sure can be annoying at times. I’ve already started implementing my strategy, and it’s already saving me time and effort.

“Everything is so simple!” The more I use Python, the more I like it. This comic from XKCD illustrates why.

So now I’m 3/4 of the way through my CougarQuest teaching commitment. I’ve had a blast so far, and the next two days should be fun as well. It is exhausting, though, to be working overtime at the office while teaching a workshop four times a week.

The students seem like they’re learning a lot, and it’s interesting to compare the differences between the middle school and high school sessions. I’ll write more about that later on. I’ll also be posting the complete curriculum for this class once things settle down a bit. I hope that helps other people who’d like to teach or take a course on human-computer interaction or interface design.

I’ve added a small new feature to this site, a subscriber count on the left sidebar. What’s a subscriber count? It’s the number of people who stay up-to-date with KylanRobinson.com by following its feed.

A feed is a published list of the latest changes to a site. I use feeds to keep an eye on all of my favorite websites. By using a feed reader like Google Reader, I can survey all of the websites I’m interested in with a single glance.

If you’ve never tried subscribing to a feed before, give it a try. It will help you become more efficient as you surf the web. To subscribe to my feed, just click on the link called “RSS Feed” or the graphic that says “___ readers by Feedburner.”

Want more information? Check out these resources:

• Getting Started with Google Reader
• Feed 101
• RSS

It’s official. I am a Gmail Ninja.

A while back, Google offered a free laminated version of their Gmail Tips cheat sheet to the first 1024 people who submitted a request. I acted quickly and today I got my copy in the mail! It’s an honor to be part of such an elite group.

According to the guide, I’m currently somewhere between a Black Belt and a Gmail Master.

For more information, please read this TechCrunch article: “Google Wants You To Become A Gmail Ninja. Or Look Like A Huge Nerd Trying.”