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Webinar Mini-Series: Email Management

We are happy to announce our new and updated seven-part email management webinar series. Local governments and state agencies across the State of Texas utilize email as a form of communication to transmit information and to conduct official business. From that business and communications, what happens to the emails and how do those emails relate…

Unmatched, brightly colored socks hanging on a clothes line.

Outlook Tips for Easy Email Management

I don’t know about you, but one of my least favorite chores is folding the laundry. Even though I know that leaving my clean clothes in a laundry basket creates problems—my work shirts get wrinkled, and I can never find socks that match—I still end up putting it off for days. For many government employees,…

FAQ: How Long Do I Keep Email?

A long time ago (relative to our blog’s history), we published the first of many frequently-asked-question articles about retention of email. The answer we give today when people ask how long to keep email is still the same (“it depends!”), but we have since published many more articles dissecting the topic. Today, we’ve compiled a…

How Can I Set Up an Email Filing System?

Setting up a filing system for your emails is a huge step in managing those sometimes insurmountable inboxes. However, sometimes those filing systems are as difficult to manage as the inboxes themselves, if folders are created on-the-fly or as seemingly needed for specific emails. One way to avoid this is by developing a filing system…

FAQ: Is Email Always Correspondence?

Every day, our email inboxes fill up with all sorts of stuff: junk mail, meeting requests, policy updates, cat photos, leave requests, automatic response emails, blog updates. It can feel unwieldy to manage the amount and the type of email pouring in during the regular course of business. For some, the impulse is to delete…

FAQ: What is Routine or Transitory Email?

In our last blog post about managing email, we looked at some examples and discussed the differences between Administrative and General Correspondence. Hopefully our brief examples helped you match your own correspondence to each of those series. The main thing about managing email that we want you to take away is that it’s always about…

Using Personal Email for Government Business is a Bad Idea – Here’s Why

We’ve all recently read about several government officials using personal email accounts or email servers to conduct government business.  But they are not alone by any means – a recent survey of 412 high-level government employees conducted by Atlantic Media’s Government Executive Meeting Group revealed that approximately one-third of the employees surveyed said they sometimes…