In My Virtual World

As a virtual assistant and small business owner, I have many different clients throughout the year and keep up with them by setting up folders for each client in my Outlook.  I have some clients that I only work for once a year for special projects, but I like to keep past correspondence to refer back to.

Well, that is a good system and a bad one.  Because I keep everything, my Inbox gets rather large.   I don’t know if it was because I have a large amount of incoming emails in my Inbox or if I got a nasty virus, but I was attempting to delete a spam email and all of a sudden it was like a large hand grabbed all of the 1200 emails in my Inbox and deleted them all.  To say I was devastated, is a huge understatement.

Luckily, my client emails were safely tucked away in their personal folders, but there were several emails that I hadn’t had an opportunity to respond to and now they are gone and I don’t have any idea who they were from.

I tried to do a Search and Recover, but to no avail.  I guess a good lesson, for me at least, is to make sure I do a back-up of my .pst files everyday and to clean out my Inbox more frequently.

How do you keep your Inbox tidy?  If you have suggestions or ideas, I would appreciate hearing from you.