Be Alert
Last week I wrote about setting up Saved Searches in Email Center Pro, and how they’ll save you valuable time.
But if you want to be super efficient, you’ll combine your Saved Searches with Alerts.
First, a few words about Alerts. You set up alerts so you don’t have to constantly check countless mailboxes. Determine what you want to be informed about — all mail, unread mail, mail assigned to you, which mailbox you’re interested in, and how often you want to be notified. Then set up as many alerts as you’d like. When mail comes in meeting your criteria, Email Center Pro sends an email to the contact email address you’ve listed for your account, on the time schedule you’ve chosen.
In other words, you’ve got your biff@yourcompany.com email address that you’re in and out of all day long. And then you’ve got your sales@, help@, info@ addresses coming into ECP. You don’t want to spend any unnecessary time hopping from inbox to inbox, but you do want to know what’s going on in all those mailboxes.
So you set up some alerts to go to your biff@ address. Maybe you want to be notified hourly when there’s unread mail in your sales@ box, and three times a day when there’s mail assigned to you in info@. Set up takes a few seconds.
Just click the Accounts & Tools link at the top of your screen, and click on the Alerts tab. You’ll see all sorts of options there, such as how often to be notified, what kind of mail you want to know about, and so on.
At this point, think back to last week’s post about Saved Searches. We discussed a hypothetical search for mail sent by Bob, assigned to Janet, tagged Newsletter, and unread. Now let’s say we saved that search and called it Sent by Bob. One way to use it would be to periodically go into ECP and run the search. Or…
We can set up an alert to let us know when mail fulfilling all our Saved Search arrives. In the Sent by Bob search, it’s possible that there are only three or four messages a month that meet all the criteria. Yet you need to know about them as soon as possible. In this case, simply click the “Mailbox” field in your Alerts and scroll down until you see the Saved Searches at the bottom of the list – and click the Sent by Bob saved search.
Your Saved Search + Alert allows you to concentrate on all your other tasks, secure in the knowledge that as soon as that Sent by Bob message hits ECP, you’ll be alerted and be able to deal with it — without having to stalk your inboxes waiting for it to happen.
Tags: ECP, ECP Power Users, ecp update
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