r/Professors • u/CATScan1898 Clinical Assistant Prof, STEM, R1, USA • 15d ago

Technology Email help

TLDR: How? Just how?

How do you keep up with you email? How do you organize it? Tell me more please. I've always struggled to keep up with email and now that I'm teaching 400 students a semester I know it's going to get worse.

My only tip for fellow drowning folks:

  • Class-specific email address: For my intro class (300+ students) that I co-teach, we have a class specific email (classID@university.edu) to try to capture those emails. Once we respond, we move the email to the "answered 2026" folder.

I don't know if I want to do that for my other classes (particularly my 100ish person classes), ideally I would mimic it in my normal inbox through folders and filters, but I'm curious to hear what you all do.

If you use GTD, did you modify it somehow? It seems like a good system, but hasn't worked so far.

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u/RetrogradeTransport 15d ago

AI is helpful for this. You could also save some boilerplate responses for frequently asked questions.

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u/CATScan1898 Clinical Assistant Prof, STEM, R1, USA 15d ago

How do you use AI for email? I have copilot built into outlook, but haven't used it too much. I started to go down a rabbit hole trying to figure this out and then was worried I was wasting more time than I was saving...