I received a few emails/calls this month from users who wanted to setup complex email rules in GoldMine to automatically delete unwanted emails from their inbox. I wanted to share my answer/response for how to deal with those emails here, but first let’s clarify what emails were talking about. For most of the users that I spoke to, the emails in question, were actually emails from businesses they had done business with in the past and had provided them their work email address. Some emails were from Amazon.com for example, some were from specific blogs or newsletters the users had subscribed to, etc. The point is that these emails were not necessarily SPAM emails. These were emails the users had signed up to receive, but simply didn’t want to receive any more.
So here are my recommendations on how to best deal with this situation.
First, don’t use your regular work/business email to sign-up for newsletters/blogs or to conduct your personal business, if its not work related. If you’re shopping at Amazon.com and use your work related email to register and place the order, then expect to get an email from Amazon with all their special deals every week. Instead, use a personal email account.
Second, if the newsletter/blog you are subscribing to is for work purposes then by all means use your work related email address and if you eventually decide that the newsletter content is not relevant any more or that you simply no longer want to receive the emails, then unsubscribe from the emails. By law, those businesses must stop sending to you, and in most cases, those businesses are using an email marketing service provider such as Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, etc and when you unsubscribe, you’re automatically removed from the newsletter subscriber list.
So rather than attempt to setup complex email rules, the best thing is to simply unsubscribe from emails you no longer want to receive, and try to avoid using your work related email for non-work related things.
If unsubscribing isn’t ideal and you simply want to sort your emails into separate folders in GoldMine to help organize your emails, then that is where setting up email rules can be helpful.
