43 Folders

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”What’s 43 Folders?”
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
mdl's picture

I need to have multiple...

I need to have multiple accounts funnelled into a single place. Gmail does the trick for me. All my accounts forward to my gmail account. And gmail is complex enough to allow me to send from my other accounts from within the gmail web app.

Granted, if someone looks closely at all the email information, they'll see that it was sent by gmail, but the address they'll receive it from is whatever address I specify. Maybe not the most professional solution, but I don't mind.

Also, there's the nifty userid+tag@gmail.com feature. I use this all the time when registering for sites, etc. For instance, if I register for the New York Times, I can give my email address as userid+nyt@gmail.com. Then I'll know if the New York Times is selling my email address. Or I could use a userid+junk@gmail.com address for subscriptions and set up a filter to label anything that comes to that address.

 
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