Handeling your E-mails

Preventing the Problem
The first thing you should do is clearly state on your website who to e-mail what, what the user should title the e-mail, etc. By adding the writer's name to each guide, you will get a lot less miss-led e-mails. It can also be helpful to make a special e-mail you use for website-related things. That way, less e-mails will land in the wrong place. Check and answer your e-mails once a day to provide a quick service to your users and aviod having things pile up.
If possible, try to replace the "@" sign with something like -at- when typing out your e-mail. This will help you avoid all those evil spam-bots that send you random advertisements. If you have extreme troubles with this anyways, consider getting a new e-mail address.

The rough sorting
Lets assume you signed into your mailbox and found 20 new e-mails sitting there. The first step should be to take a peak at the subjects. Anything with no definate subject should be looked at first. If its spam, delete it. If not, keep it, but remember to answer it *last* since its rude of your visitors not to bother putting in a proper subject when asked to. You want the visitors who write out the subject to get answered first. Then look at the different subjects. Most likely, you'll find several Staff Applications, Apply for Affiliates, some random questions and some for services (cutenews hosting, website feedback etc). If anything is marked as "urgent" or "important", look at it. If its just someone applying for affiliate or something else that isn't world moving -- make note to reply them as one of the last people too. Its again rude to do that since an affiliate application is next to never "urgent". If something really is urgent though, take care of it straight away. Delete all e-mails that are just "OK" or whatever to a previous e-mail (for example, if Joe applies to be affiliate, you accept him and he sends back "OK". You don't need to answer that). *Always* take the time to answer affiliate requests though, else you will just be e-mailed the same thing over again

More Detail
You are now left with all sorts of different e-mails, all of which need to be answered. Now you want to try to get the fast things out of the way first. Why? Because if I expect a 10 word answer, I would await it within a day. Whilst if I expect a 10 paragraph answer, I would not be upset if it toke the site owner several days to get back to me. The quickest for me is usually a Staff Application since 90% are turned down at sight. Take the time to decline is a polite way. Remember always to put your site URL under your name. If by a staff application for graphic maker someone didn't list examples even though asked, delete the e-mail or send it back to them. Even if you turn someone down or cannot help someone, always reply to them. After staff applications come affie applications. Go through all of them and turn the ones you need to down first. Then add the new affiliates and contact them about it. What you should do now is answer all questions. These require the most detail and time, so be prepared to spend a while on them and be concentrated.

Wrapping it up
Of course, these are just general tips. You will sometimes loose a mail or forget something -- it happends to the best of us and theres nothing you can do about it. Remember to check the spam folder every day or so. Following these tips should, however, make you able to answer all your e-mails within 48 hours. I hope this tutorial helped you -- if you have any questions or comments, feel free to e-mail me.

~ Kathrin