Nurudeen AbdulAzeez receives around 70 emails daily as Head of Quality Assurance for an IT company. He acknowledges emails immediately if a quick response is needed and responds to others by the end of the day if not urgent. When on leave, he sets an automatic out-of-office reply to notify senders and delegates authority to another person to handle emails. Upon returning, any emails received are for information only. He sorts emails into folders by priority and urgency to ensure the most important are addressed first.

1. The Interview has been edited for brevity and clarity

2. We recently sat with Nurudeen AbdulAzeez who is
the Head of Quality Assurance of an IT company to
explain how he manages the huge amount of mails
he gets daily. Below is what he has to say on
managing emails especially when you receive lots of
mails daily.
1. Can you tell us the number of mails you receive
averagely on a daily basis?
On average I receive up to 70 mails daily.

3. 2. If you have lots of mails that require your
immediate response, how do you do that?
At times, I only need to acknowledge receiving a
mail and if there is need for reply then I do that later.
There are some mails that will demand an ASAP
response and then there are some that don’t and I
usually respond to those at close of business if reply
not needed immediately but very important I
respond.

4. 3. When on leave and you resume to see lots of
direct mails that requires your response, how do
you go through them all?
I don’t need to worry about that because before I go
for leave I set my mail to be on automatic reply or
vacation responder so that whoever send me mail
gets an auto response that I am on leave. This
ensures that when you send me a mail, an auto
response is sent to you informing you of my

5. unavailability and referring to whom I’ve assigned
DOA ( Delegation of Authority). The person whom
you’ve assigned DOA takes care of the mail. So this
helps me as when I resume I know that there are no
mails waiting for my response instead any mails I
receive is an FYI (For Your Information ) mail. Also
when you resume and find out that there’s a mail from
a sender on same topic severally, you can open the
latest sent instead because that contains the previously

6. sent mails hence you save time in the amount of mail
you have to go through.

7. 4. How do you prioritize your mails?
Mails that are urgent and important takes the highest
priority and I go through them first. Important mails
but not urgent can wait for response possibly before
the close of business. After which I go through the
rest. I use different folders to group and better
organize my mails. So I know where to open for
important mails and urgent mails by creating rules
for them. You can set rules for Outlook and Gmail

8. 5. Do you do same prioritization for your personal
mails?
For personal mails, I do get pop ups and
notifications so I read, delete, and save any mails I
get. I do not wait for them to pile up.

9. Continue reading to learn how to create Inbox rules for
your Gmail and Outlook 

10. How To Create Inbox Rules On Gmail

11. Creating Folders
Follow this guide on how to create a new Folder to move mails
 From Categories in the left Folder navigation pane, select
‘Create new label’
 Enter the name of the Folder in “New Label” field
 When done, click the Down arrow in the Search area at the top

12. Creating Rules
 Enter the mail name or address you want to filter in
‘From’ field box and you can also enter keywords
associated to that sender for effective filtering
 Add your mail in the ‘To’ field box. You can also select
specific sizes of mails to be moved if you wish. When
done select ‘Create filter with this search
 Next step shows you some rules, select the rules you want
to apply to the mail. For newly created label, you

13. can tick ‘Apply the label’ box and select the name of the label.
When done, click on ‘Create filter

14. How To Create Inbox Rules On Outlook

15. Creating Folders
The following steps will guide you on how to create a Folder
for your outlook mail to better organize your mails
 Open Outlook
 Click on Add (+) sign in Folders pane
 Enter a name for the Folder in the text field
 Press the Enter key
 Right-click the newly created Folder to see changes you can
make to it such as renaming, adding subfolders, or move Folder
to a different location

16. Creating Rules
Follow this guide to create a rule to automatically move mails
to the newly created Folder
 Right-click the mail (s) you usually want to move into this
Folder
 Select ‘create rule’
 Click the rules you want applied in the conditions listed. (Here
you can add as many conditions as you want).
 Select the Folder you want to move the mails to the next rule
text field

17.  Outlook also allows you to add exceptions. For example,
you can decide to not move mails from the sender if it is
in some certain size range, and you can choose to only
move bulky mails to this Folder.
 Click OK. So when next a mail from that sender arrives,
it’s automatically moved to this Folder.
This helps you manage and organize your mail effectively.