Some very useful and practical advice from this article that was originally published at Harvard Business Review and apply to maritime email as well.

The average professional spends 28% of the work day reading and answering email, according to a McKinsey analysis. That averages to many hours spent on hundreds of messages received per day. Here are some best practices that will help you to get back unnecessarily lost time.

• Use search and Omni tags, not folders, to find emails.
  Most people create folders for various subjects or people or types of messages to archive accordingly. On average, people create a new email folder every five days. But this approach — clicking on folders to find what you need — is slower than searching with tags and keywords, or much slower when compared with Omni search using a combination of text and common operators (i.e., from, addressee, vessel, type, project etc.)
• Plan on how to check your emails.
  Use Telix features like Alarms, High/Low preference senders and saved selections of messages to focus on what is important. Depending on your role in the company, scheduling time every hour to check non-essential messages, will save time.
• Filing emails into many folders requires time.
  Roughly 10% of the total time people spend on email is spent filing messages they want to keep. We know that folders aren’t needed for re-finding emails, so how many do we really need? According to Hick’s Law a choice decision between 37 folders is five times slower than a two-folder decision; we need to multiply accordingly for hundreds of folders.
• Avoid processing irrelevant or less important emails individually.
  Make sure that your Inbox messages are relevant to you. Telix offers the convenience of unified mailbox (i.e., multiple email accounts) but also offers the ability to separate your email accounts in two groups: those of your primary interest and those that you want to inspect occasionally. Don’t fall into the trap of having everything in your inbox.
  Use incoming rules to automatically process your messages and an antispam filter to keep spam messages away from your Inbox.
  According to data from Sanebox, more than half of all email is not important and can be processed in bulk (i.e., deleted or tagged for archive).
• Contact Telix helpdesk.
  We will be happy to assist you implementing email best practices with your Telix system.

LgPList Marketplace Add-on

Telix now offers the ability to show additional vessel positions to enrich market information available to ship brokers using LgPList.  Most brokers rely on their own incoming messages for vessel positions but this Telix add-on will provide additional positions from a Digital Shipping Marketplace even from messages you never received.

LgMAR and SHIPNEXT - a Digital Shipping Marketplace, have formed a partnership to provide TELiX users with an additional option which further improves LgMAR Shipbroking Suite with information over and above of those in their in house system. This brings the shipping and chartering world to a new dimension which majority of the companies were long looking for - digital interconnectivity.

The following technologies work in tandem to further empower shipbrokers which will, as has been proof-tested, become some much more efficient in managing their workflow:

• AutoRead© can silently scan all your incoming messages and translate these to vessel positions, useful information appropriately commented and classified.
• LgPList© is assisting brokers to manage information related to vessels and positions. Information from incoming messages are immediately available to all users. Examine your data by type, date, size, area, commissions, source, account, etc and summarize to a report, a message or a circular list ready to be forwarded.
• Shipnext is a Digital Shipping Marketplace and Freight Management Platform, that provides instant data and e-mail processing, instant Cargo-to-Ship matching, freight trading and contract management, digital documentation flow, freight finance and supply chain management solutions.

Browsing our older messages since 1989 we found some interesting facts about the evolution and pricing of messaging and email for Shipping.

The cost for transmitting a telex message in 1990 was $8.81 (Network World Magazine, August 1990). 

Telix dropped the cost of the same message to $0.60 (BIMCOM price list 1991).

The following years the cost further dropped to $0.17 (COMTEXT price list 1996).

By 1999 most of the maritime companies were using Telix and Internet to transmit messages without any cost.

Telix continues to lead the shipping messaging ever since.

Dear friends and associates,

We were informed about some email fraud attempts targeting specifically shipping companies and we would like to offer some practical advice below on how to avoid email fraud and phishing.

The specific frauds attempts originated from a look alike email address of a shipping agent, informing that money transfers should be made to a different bank account. Such frauds failed when recipients paid attention to the originating email address which was not correct but "look alike", and initiated a phone verification with the counter parties of the bank account change. Please always keep in mind that email communication is between at least two parties and even though you probably have made every effort to keep your messages confidential, the same cannot be said with certainty for the other parties involved in the communication loop.

What we suggest: