Managing email consent and inbox control

From a Consultant Neurosurgeon in the UK: "I just spent 2 hours answering emails." "At the end, I had more unread emails in my inbox than when I started." Emails are a necessary part of our job. But through my online coaching with doctors and surgeons, I see the same pattern being repeated: - Drip-feeding emails throughout the day. - Anxiety about the number of unread emails. - Building a reputation of being "email responsive" (and so getting more emails). With more and more doctors getting burnt out from piling admin work, here are a few strategies to manage your emails. 1. Unsubscribe from any automated trust emails you never read. This cuts your inbox number by about a third off the bat. 2. Create folders to organise emails instead of leaving them to sit in your inbox. Folder titles can be: reference; Friday review; patients waiting for surgery; done by the end of the week; or research projects. Your imagination is the limit here. Use what works for you. *Folders such as "Friday review" only work if you actually review them every Friday. 3. Time block 2-3 hours over a week to process your inbox. Don't open your emails because you're sitting at your desk or are bored. And don't open your emails unless you are prepared to do step 4. 4. Touch emails once. Once an email is opened there are 3 outcomes. - Delete. - Move to your calendar as a meeting, or to a reference file from step 2. - Reply. If you reply, be conscious that writing an email is the main source of receiving emails, which is more work for you. So aim to write concluding emails that end the chain. Following this, once an email is opened it doesn't get opened again. It gets processed and so only "touched once". 5. There is no such thing as an "urgent email". Emails by definition are not time-critical. No one will die if you don't check your inbox. So don't treat them like they are. 6. Don't email at home. This blurs work/home barriers. You wouldn't call your children's school to "check what's happening" during an operation. So why is it OK to check in with work when you're at home with your family? If you follow steps 1-5 your inbox will be under control and you won't need to think about them at home. Remember. Email is triage. Not work. What systems do you use to keep your inbox under control? Please share them in the comments. I'm always open to new ideas.

Anecdotes From the Abuse Desk Vol. I As a Compliance and Deliverability Enablement Principal II (electric booglaoo), I handle abuse reports that come in to the abuse desk. This is both less scary and more fun than it sounds! An "abuse report" is just another term for a spam complaint, as sending spam is an abuse of resources. If a recipient believes spam has originated from our system, they can send it in along with any comments they're inclined to share. Often the comments are simple and straightforward, if heavy on the caps lock, like "SPAM" or "Please disable this abuser's account NOW!". Sometimes they're more colorful, which is my favorite. While your inbox has been filling up with Christmas coupons and ho-ho-holiday cheer, mine has been full of gifts like this sample, which has been lightly edited for public release. Besides being funny, the guy has a point! Senders often conflate two actions, perhaps deliberately: ✉️ Providing an email address 📨 Subscribing to emails Believe it or not, most people don't want to receive daily emails as a consequence of providing their email address to accomplish something like creating an account or registering for an app/product. If they are obligated to provide an address, then they need to be given full transparency into, and control over, how their address will be used. It's common for brands to include consent language in the fine print of their terms & conditions or privacy policy, and to require that users agree to those conditions/policies in order to complete registration. That may be an ironclad legal strategy, but it does nothing to protect your deliverability. Sender reputation and your resulting inbox placement are not based on whether people agreed to receive your emails, but on whether they demonstrably want them. Consent is crucial, but that consent has to be genuine and can't be coerced. Yahoo and Gmail aren't going to check your records to verify whether someone checked a box to agree to your terms before processing spam complaints; the complaint itself is sufficient to indicate that the mail is unwanted, and that's what mailbox providers care about. If you require users to provide an email address during registration: 👎 Reconsider! What about a username instead? Or a phone number? 🪟 Be transparent! Ask people outright, in plain language, if they want to receive emails. Yes, even account-related ones. Your ability to classify a message as transactional doesn't miraculously make people want it, nor does it prevent reputation problems. ✔️ ✔️ Confirm opt-in! When someone signs up, send an email and ask them to confirm that they intended to sign up, either by clicking a link or providing a code back in the app/site. Users may have unintentionally agreed to receive emails during registration, so this will ensure that they deliberately signed up and are likely to remain engaged over time. 🤫 Sustained engagement is the closest thing to a free pass to the inbox that exists.

The “growth hack” that quietly destroys your email program. A DTC brand came to us after using identity-resolution tool for months. Looked like a win. Emailing anonymous site visitors. No opt-in required. ROI looked solid on paper. But under the hood? It was silently killing them. Here’s what we found: • <2% click rates in high intent flows. • Deliverability quietly decaying • Spam placement was creeping up. • Engagement was dropping. And the brand had no idea why. This is how email dies: Not with a crash. But with a quiet, invisible bleed. You think you’re growing your list. When you flood your system with cold ID's that never asked for your emails… You send a signal. That signal tells Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook: “No one wants this.” And the platforms respond: “Then no one gets it.” That’s how real growth gets throttled. That’s how your best subscribers stop seeing you. That’s how your highest-converting flows stop converting. That’s how your list, your most valuable asset, becomes a liability. Here’s what inbox providers care about: Not list size. Not flashy automations. Not smart retargeting tools. Just one thing: Are real humans engaging with your emails? If the answer is no, cuz you’re pumping non-opted-in IDs through your system, then... Gmail throttles you. Yahoo buries you. Outlook stops listening. And your real subscribers? They stop seeing you too! That’s the cost of chasing fake growth. Here’s the fix: • Stop emailing people who didn’t opt in • Suppress low-engagement profiles fast • Segment identity-resolved contacts into their own sandbox • Monitor engagement and inboxing like your business depends on it (Because it does)