Combat Carbon Copy Bloat

What’s the second biggest contributor to email volume behind spam?  Carbon Copy Bloat.  The concept of copying everyone who might be remotely interested in the contents of a message has taken hold in the business world in a big way.  This can be a particularly huge problem for a manager who is CC:d on every communication between team members.

If you suffer from this problem, ClearContext can be customized to minimize the impact of copied messages.  Under Tools > Options > ClearContext > Scoring Options are four sliders that control the weighting of individual messages.  Adjust the "Message Directness" slider to the left to place less importance on messages where you are CC:’d or BCC:’d.   These messages will appear lower in your  prioritized inbox.  To counter this effect, adjust the "Thread Participation" slider to the right to ensure that conversations you are actively involved in (i.e. you responded to a message you were previously CC:d on) will be scored higher than those you are simply copied on.