Email Overload
Unfortunately, far too many of us deal with the difficult issue of email overload. So much of our communication is done digitally and through email in particular. It seems to be increasingly difficult for many people to find an email routine that leaves their inbox clean and their mind at ease. An inbox that is bursting at the seams has a great impact on your mind. Though you may close your inbox, your brain does not turn off the reminders that you have 3,453 emails waiting to be read, deleted or archived. Over time, this will not only increase your stress levels, but it will also max out your email storage forcing you to deal with it, or in the case of our reader John, create a brand new account and start the horror over again.You Ask …
I Answer …
John, you are a recovering email hoarder. Don't worry, you are not alone.Before we answer John's Question…..Steve Goes Old School!
The first course I ever developed was called 3 Steps to Inbox Zero
It is focuses on EXACTLY THE ISSUE OF EMAIL OVERLOAD!
It may be a bit ragged around the edges (I was still figuring out my video style ect) bu the content is top notch!
Here is the Sign Up
Now on to John's immediate issue: Start by deleting and removing what you do not need from your account, the steps below will help outline how to do this quickly. Mass delete messages: Select>Select All Messages>Delete Step 1:
Step 2:
Step 3: 
Remove spam messages:
Spam>Delete all spam messages now
Step 1:
Step 2:
Remove repeated messages:
Enter the Subject, To, or From into the search bar>Search>Select All>Select all messages that match this search>Delete
Step 1:
Step 2:
Step 3:
Deleting messages from your mailboxes will move the message from that particular mailbox and into the trash. To free up storage space, be sure to delete the messages from the trash for permanent removal and to reclaim the space on your account.
To remove messages from Trash
Trash>Empty Trash Now
Step 1:
Step 2: 
Other Tools to Help with Email Overload:
Many times, an overflowing inbox means you subscribed to numerous newsletters and haven't had a chance to unsubscribe from them all. Unsubscribing can be a tedious task. Unroll.me is a tool designed to assist with this. We have a video on Unroll.me that you may find useful.
Find Big Mail
Scans email to identify large attachments, compile them for your review so you can delete them and save on space.
We know that John is not alone in this battle of being inundated by email overload. It is a real problem for many. Once you have caught up and gained control of your email inbox by utilizing some or all of the steps recommended, adopting a plan such as inbox zero, will help to increase your productivity and decrease the stress of your inbox. A quick Google search will provide many resources for the concept of inbox zero.
We hope that these tips help you to take a sigh of relief, and avoid yourself being captured on an episode of Hoarders! Until next time … have fun stormin' the castle!
Steve Dotto here. How the heck are you doing this fine day? Me? Like my friend, Billy, I am in a New York state of mind indeed. Today, we are going to answer quick little questions that you’ve been asking me for some time here on Ask DottoTech, little answers to big problems that cause you much concern. Stick around.
If you have a question for me to answer, that is what this show is all about. You ask the questions. I answer them. Now where you go to ask these questions is right here on YouTube. Go into the Comments area and please post your questions there. I cannot promise to answer each and every question but I do my best. If it doesn’t make it here on the show, I’ll often answer it right within the forum itself. So let’s dive into things, shall we?
The first question comes from Wan Ted who asked in reference to two-step verification. I did a video a while back on using two-step verification which is a terrific way to protect your privacy. Essentially, what two-step verification is you need to receive a code on your phone in order to access your Google account or one of your accounts, an account which requires security. It’s two-factor authentication, not only your username and password but then also a remote service delivering you a code to go in. It’s a great way to do things, far less inconvenient that it sounds. You should check out the video which we will link to right here.
Having said, Wan is concerned because—and it’s a legitimate concern—“What happens if I lose my phone? Does that mean that I can’t ever log into my accounts?” Great question, Wan, and it’s one that we should all be concerned with. Fortunately, Google has thought of that as far as their two-factor authentication goes. We’ll have a link to this particular document in the show notes, in the description below but these are the common issues that people have. Right there at the top, “What happens if my phone is lost or stolen?” They walk you step-by-step through what you need to do if your phone is lost or stolen.
The first thing you do is revoke your password and then you work your way through what Google recommends you do. So you’ll be inconvenienced for a short period of time but you will be able to get back in. You will be able to set everything up. This should not dissuade you from using two-factor or two-step authentication. It is good and it increases your chances of keeping your privacy protected immeasurably. Two-factor authentication – I’ve got nothing but good things to say about it.
Next up, we have from Ricardo Rivera who asks, “When I share a file in Dropbox, how can I take out the Share button on the recipient side so that they only have the option to download it?” He wants to share the document but not allow the people to edit the document. I thought it’s simple. In the Share options in Dropbox, you just tell people that it’s a read-only document. So I mentioned that here but I will show it in the show and now I’ve been brought up short because I was in error.
When we visit Dropbox, where you go to set your sharing preferences is not in the desktop app but you have to go to the web version and you go into your account in Dropbox on the web. There you can choose to share any folder or any file. If I open a folder here that I wanted to share and I click here on this little rainbow folder that says Share this folder, then I can type in the name of anybody who I want to share this document with. Simple so far, right? Of course, right.
But look here, anyone can edit. Anyone can view but that’s greyed out. See, this what I was wanting him to use in order to have people just view the document and not be able to edit it but it’s greyed out. Why is it greyed out? It turns out Dropbox wants us to pay for that particular privilege. Open sharing? Free. Just read-only? It’s one of the Premium features so you have to have a paid account, not the shared or the free account which is what I am obviously running here now and what I imagine Ricardo is also running. So I was in error, Ricardo, when I said that you could just do it by going to the sharing. You have to upgrade to the Premium version to do what you want to do. Hmm…
Next up, we have Jack and I’m not even going to try and pronounce Jack’s last name. Jack’s asking specifically about Evernote, how I add the atlas feature which I showed in a video we did quite a while ago, which is one of my 5 Favorite Evernote Features. The good news, Jack, is the atlas feature is still one of my five favourite features in Evernote and it’s pretty simple and straightforward to access. But I suspect the reason why you’re having an issue is you’re using the web version where it tends to be hidden.
Here is what the atlas feature does. I’ve got it here available on my side bar right here so I click on the atlas feature. It brings up everywhere I created notes. It’s brilliant. It uses geo-location services so if you create a note or take a picture of a receipt or whatever it is when you’re on the road traveling anywhere, you can sort all those notes by where they were created, not just by the time or by the title as you would do with normal search. So if you’re on the road and you’re in a restaurant and you take a picture of the receipt, rather than have to search for the name of the restaurant when you go to submit the receipt, you can just look for where I was when I created that note. It’s a great feature.
How do you access it? Well, if it’s not available in your side bar in the desktop version, right-clicking your mouse allows you to turn on and off what you see. So you can turn on the atlas from here. Failing that, you could at any time go onto the View menu in the desktop version and choose Atlas from the View menu. Unfortunately, it does not appear to be available in the web version so you could only access the atlas through the apps, the desktop version or the mobile version. I hope that that answers that question.
Finally, G-D A asks actually based on last week’s Ask DottoTech. He said one day he decided to put an avatar in his Gmail account. He added an avatar to his Gmail account and it was a mistake. Now he wants to remove the signature, the image from the signature within his Gmail account and he cannot figure out how to use it. I’m a little bit confused about what the issue is because I will show you in a moment. He mentions that there’s lots of help online available to change your overall avatar for your Gmail or for your Google account, which I actually found some problems with as I was doing research on this. So let’s just dive in and make sure that you all understand what we’re talking about as far as changing the avatar in your signature file.
In Google and Gmail, if you go under the gear setting at any point, you can go into the Settings and on the first page of Settings—there are multiple different pages of settings here—if we scroll down to the bottom, we will have a signature where we can add a signature to our email. Now he said he added an avatar. I don’t see any link to create what Google is calling an avatar but I have pasted in a picture myself. If you want to remove it, you can just be able to click on it and click on Remove and it should remove it. So I think that’s probably the issue you’re having. You haven’t probably gone into the Settings to find this, but I’m not positive.
However having said that, as I was going through setting up and playing with our different images, I discovered something kind of unique about Google account. Changing is our personal avatar, this picture that we have is not the same at all times. Let me show you. If we go into our Google profile here and I want to change this picture that I have here, that I’m using here, I can go in and I can click on Edit profile, which will then allow me to change the picture just by clicking on the little camera icon. So if I wanted to change it—let me upload a different photo because I’ve got a few of them. I’ll do my thumbs up one. There we go. I’ll open that. So I’ve got all these great little pictures that I can use for this sort of thing.
When I upload the photo, look, what it does. It just drops it in. It didn’t allow me to frame it or do anything with it. It just dropped it in. It gave me no editing options right here from the Edit profile. I don’t like that. I want to be able to frame it myself. So I discovered if you go to this page here which is Google About Me, which brings you to the About Me page, if we go in and we edit our picture here, when we go and use any of the pictures here—there we go, I’ll use this one here. There we go, I’ll choose that one there—I can actually frame it, I can position it exactly where I want and I have an awful lot more control over it.
Now one thing I noticed and it’s a little bit confusing to me how Google handles these things, it seems that some of the images are available when I do the account this way and if you noticed, there were other images available in the last time that I edited it. Whether or not that’s a Gmail, Google+ thing, it gets a little bit confusing and Google of course does nothing to help us discover it. But if you want to control your avatar that appears in your Google profile, I suggest that you go to your Google About Me page. There you can go and you can edit everything else that appears in your file as well. This would appear to be the best place for updating your profile information.
That is it for today. I hope that you found today’s videos to be useful. Now there are three ways to stay in touch with us here on DottoTech. The first is please subscribe to this channel. The second is subscribe to our newsletter. Then you’ll hear about all of our upcoming live events and webinars and we’re doing an increasing number of training and tutorial webinars. Finally, DottoTech is funded through the support of people like you at the crowdfunding site, Patreon. I encourage you to drop by, have a look and discover what it means to be a patron of DottoTech, what it does for us and what perks are available for you. Till next time, I’m Steve Dotto. Have fun storming the castle! 
