43 Folders

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Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.

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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
Paul's picture

Also, how do you all...

Berko;7181 wrote:
Also, how do you all keep track of which aliases you use? For me, I have used basically the same email address everywhere because if I ever forget my password, I shudder to think what it would take to remember A) that I used a +Alias and B) what that alias actually was.

That's why I haven't joined the '+' crew yet, although I agree that it's a way cool feature.

My thought would be to be sure to keep it super generic: name+newsletter@gmail.com for all newsletters, name+blog@gmail.com (all for blog comment registrations), etc., sticking to a very small list of + combinations.

For some stuff, it may not matter if you remember or not - "name+iwanttoreadthisonearticlefromsomepodunkonlinepaperthatihavetoregisterforbuti'llnevercombackagain@gmail.com."

 
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