handling automated emails

I used to get about 600 a day. I handled them using E-mail rules, office procedures, and "what made sense to me."

First, I grouped E-mails according to how I wanted to handle them and what they did:

- notifications of success
- failure exceptions
- performance reports
- monitoring alerts
- etc...

Second, I created folders to hold different types of E-mail. These were further divided where it made sense (e.g. performance reports separated by instance).

Next, I wrote rules to automatically handle the majority of regular messages. I found that 90% of the E-mails could be looked at later or ignored completely (I am willing to bet you will find the same).

After that, I set myself a schedule. Check backup reports first. Look at performance numbers for the last week on Tuesday. Deal with disk space alerts immediately.

Once this ran for a while, I looked for ways to streamline. If a backup was successful, it should say so in the message header so that I don't have to actually open it. Some "excessive SQL" reports would have no data because no statement exceeded my thresholds. I would sort by message size and delete anything less than 5k.

Now my E-mails I handled personally. If you have more than one person can handle, I would recommend having a agreed method of dividing the work. Have everyone add a rule that separates other people's mail to avoid confusion.

HTH,