Pretty much all email clients have some sort of new mail notification. Be it a sound, pop-up, tray icon or whatever, the purpose of it is to grab your attention. While this is certainly convenient, it also can be quite distracting… especially if you have a lot of spam getting through.
Before we swapped our email to run through Postini, I would get roughly 50 spam messages a day. While Outlook’s built in filters and SpamBayes would filter 95% of it, the new email would still trigger the notification. If you figure each distraction costs about 30 seconds to get your initial train of thought back, this is approximately a 30 minute time waster each day which prompted me to disable the notification.
Keep in mind, your new email notification’s usefulness is directly proportional to the effectiveness of your spam filter. Since Postini has virtually eliminated our spam, my new mail notifications are now working exactly as they were intended.
Jason Faulkner is the man who brings you our daily tips. He is based in Atlanta, Georgia.
Is Your New Mail Notification A Distraction?
just another advertisement..you lose credibility each time I mistakenly land here
tsk tsk
My apologies for finding this service incredibly useful and passing it along.
Had Postini for several years as a service with my previous server. They did a fairly good job of removing spam, but did not catch all, and quite often grabbed legitimate mail, so that part was quite inconvenient. Especially, since my business used that mailbox.
I did eventually get a different mailbox for the business…..and Postini was not able to serve that one.
Then, I changed internet servers when I went to DSL, and Postini was/is completely unavailable.
However, the service did a fairly decent job, but one does have to check the site frequently, grab the good mail and delete the spam.
So far, so good for me… no false positives yet and nothing has been held up in my quarantine which is legit.