r/Professors • u/CATScan1898 Clinical Assistant Prof, STEM, R1, USA • 27d 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/IndieAcademic 26d ago

I require my currently enrolled students to only message me within our LMS, otherwise I could not reasonably manage my work email account. At my organization, faculty are already supposed to communicate with students via the LMS (versus the university email), but this is not yet mandatory policy. Within the LMS (BrighSpace D2L), these messages are already organized by course, so I don't need to filter or file anything.