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43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

eMail: lots of accounts, no organisation

My name is Andrew, i'm 24, and i'm a email-account-oholic

My Thunderbird is jammed packed with email accounts, from general day-to-day usage ones, to one shot "i need a email account for this mailing list" accounts, and thats not even counting the 20ish forwarders i have on the server-side, Add to that two gmail accounts and i've got a right royal mess.

Within the next week or so my old server is finally going to be decomissioned and i'm moving my hosting solution to a new provider so this presents a oppertunity to give my email accounts a spring clean.

My question is: how do the people of 43F handle their email accounts, do you have seperate accounts for types of mail (such as personal mail, public email address, mailing lists) or a catch-all solution? Any hints or recomendations would be much appreciated.

TOPICS: Life Hacks
tychoish's picture

I have a number of...

I have a number of Gmail accounts, along with a couple of ISP addresses and what not, and the organization was getting to me too. What I've done is used gmail as my major interface for everything except my .edu address, which I keep seperatly mostly becuase I find it hard to send over smtp with Gmail from my campus email address (and conversely impossible to send campus mail over SMTP when I'm not on campus). And in any case it all ends up in Mail.app anyway.

While I think the Gmail filters are good as filters, the interface to create and edit filters is cumbersome and takes a lot to quickly add new dimensions to existing rules. Say, I have a filter for "extended family correspondence" and my uncle gets a new address, I'd like to be able to add the new address to the filter, in a couple of steps without a lot of scrolling. Mail.app's rules are great for this.

If the filters were marginally better, I'd probably use gmail more often for day to day emailing, but mail.app works just fine, and I almsot always have my mac with me, so it's not a great issue.

Cheers,

 
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