When I recently downloaded my email, and there were 13,000+ messages that had made it past my filters, I knew that I had to do something. It's simply impossible to work through that many messages in less than a few days... which is what my team and I did. In the process, I'm sure that we deleted more than a few that we didn't really intend to.

Before working through that PILE, I realized that I needed a better solution immediately! After discussions with many advisors and close friends, I settled upon using a help desk. Now I force many contacts to go through that system rather than emailing me. I has reduced the sheer volume by about 90%.

In researching help desk options, I asked a lot of friends what they used. I also posted to several popular discussion boards. What I discovered was that there are many different excellent options. They range in price from free to very expensive. I delayed the decision on a final option, but implemented a temporary one that may turn into a permanent one. I simply had to give myself and my assistants some breathing room :-)

The advantages of setting up a help desk, and encouraging your customers to contact you through it, are countless. Let me share with you just a few:

1) It can completely eliminate the barrage of spam sent to random email addresses. Depending upon how you configure your help desk, you can allow customers to file a help ticket via email. However, it has to be sent to a very specific email address. So you could theoretically shut down all other email addresses on that domain.

Many web hosts allow you to delete or "black hole" all email not sent to legitimate addresses. This is a life saver. The host that I've set up numerous accounts with, and have my help ticket system set up on, allows this. Not only that, but this host is so gracious that I'm using 1000 meg of disk space and 120gig of monthly bandwidth and it's free. Actually it's not totally free. It's part of a monthly membership site that I belong to where members get unlimited free hosting.

I'm getting slightly sidetracked here, so if you want to know more about how I get unlimited free web hosting, check out: http://MassiveCashFromArticles.com

2) A help ticket system can organize those numerous email dialogues that many of us have going at the same time. Often, I'll respond to 30 different people about consulting or various projects/ proposals that we are contemplating. A few hours or days later, some of them might respond. In the past, the problem was that the response was often something like "Yes, let's do option 2"... and they would have not included the body of the original message.

That use to drive me crazy - because I had to try to reconstruct what specific conversations they were responding to. Please don't YOU do that. If you're replying to someone, be sure to include at least enough of the original message to confirm what the conversation is about.

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