We’ve all heard of phishing scams. There are numerous attempts everyday to get you to give up your personal information. And I received one recently. Sadly, it went to my inbox. But before I mark it spam and send it on its way, I want to share it with you. Here is screenshot of the offending email from my inbox:

I would like to draw your attention to a few things that tip me off that this is, in fact, a phishing scam. First of all, the return email address is “account”, and it it goes to a European site. While …read more

The video above shows an interview of efficiency expert Julie Morgenstern saying that you shouldn’t check email in the morning. Although others have suggested this, including Tim Ferriss, I can’t say I’ve successfully tried it to the point that it was permanent.
How often do you check email? Do you find any difference in your productivity when you check your email first thing in the morning when you get to work?

No, this isn’t Morbid Theme Day. But it’s a valid question, don’t you think? Hopefully the presentation below can provide you with some answers:

PimpYourWork.com
“The 4 Hour Workweek” by Tim Ferriss has been all over the blogosphere and mainstream media for the past year. The title sounds like a scam or a gimmick, and you half-expect that the official website will be a lengthy one-page sales letter that starts with “Dear Friend”. Thankfully, the reality is different: the official blog has an active community and has some additional ideas that aren’t discussed at length in the book.
The book captivated me, gave me a lot of dangerous ideas, and made me want to try it on my own. In this series of …read more

PimpYourWork.com
I don’t know what happened.  I thought I had it under control.
For over a month now, I’ve been relatively email spam-free.  I only got roughly 1 or 2 spam messages in my inbox per week.
The last two days were different.  When I woke up the other morning, I had over 150 messages.  That’s rare in itself.  What’s worse is that roughly 140 of them were spam.
And this hasn’t stopped.
Is this what the Gods of Email Spam give me because I’ve been too boastful about how I tamed email overload? They’re up there, those spam gods, saying “There! Knocked you down …read more

You want to download an exclusive report or document, but to get to it you need to send in your email address. You know what’s going to happen – these people are going to send you some “newsletters” or, well, spam. If you absolutely need access to something but don’t want to be riddled with unsolicited emails as a result, you can get a throwaway email address from Mailinator.
Here’s how it works:
How do I create an account at Mailinator? It’s simple, you just send email to it. Temporary accounts are created when email arrives for them. First, you …read more

This is part 2 of “How I Freed Myself from Mountains of Email“.
After killing off spam and miscellaneous notifications, I did a few more things that are helping me get less email everyday.
Modified Email Rules and Alerts. Incoming mail is now organized based on criteria I set such as the sender (is it a client? relative? affiliate network?) and these criteria help me file email in the proper folders and deal with them there. If, at any given time, I just want to focus on one thing (replying to relatives, greeting clients, or invoicing), I just go to the …read more