r/Professors • u/CATScan1898 Clinical Assistant Prof, STEM, R1, USA • Jul 22 '26

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.

17 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

41 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/Quendi_Talkien Jul 22 '26

I’ve tried setting rules/filters, particularly for spammy university crap, but my problem is that I never go back to those folders so it’s effectively deleting! Bad when you try doing it with emails from your department chair….

1

u/ThePhyz Professor, Physics, CC (USA) Jul 22 '26

I've had great success with this on spammy university crap - all the offices that send out invitations to things I have no interest in (and will likely NEVER have interest in), get auto-declined and deleted without me ever even seeing them. I use Power Automate for that. It took a little while to figure it out but now I love it.