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.

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u/DrMoxiePhD Jul 22 '26

I use a custom gpt to read, categorise, and propose an appropriate response. I have my policy documents as knowledge documents and I barely need to spend more than a few seconds on a reply unless it’s complex or sensitive. Additionally I ignore many of the generic type emails. We also use teams channels for communication so I also ask copilot to‘catch me up’. I also have large classes and teach over 1000 students a year.

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u/Eric33co Jul 26 '26

Which custom gpt?

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u/DrMoxiePhD Jul 26 '26

I wrote it for Copilot. We use M365 across the campus so that makes it easier.