Simplifying Inboxes 2007: Email

Posted on June 29, 2007 by
Categories: Productivity,Simplification

During my examination of how information comes into my life, I found that there was a much larger amount of potential “in boxes” than I had thought. My task was to list all of these input spaces and see if the number could be reduced, and then make sure that each of them get processed.

In this post I will tackle my worst offender: email.

I will fully admit that I have managed to collect far too many email addresses. After doing this re-perusal of my email addresses, I realized that I have added more to the collection after thinning them out two years ago. This is how it broke down:

  • Work-related: 1 for client, 1 corporate account
  • Home: 1 personal through DSL, 1 family account through DSL
  • Volunteer: 1 webmaster account
  • My domains: 2 GMail accounts that handle everything
  • Other: 1 yahoo account, 2 other GMail accounts, one for general and one for anonymous access

That’s a lot of email to check!

Non-POP

I started by dividing the email into two types: POP and non-POP. POP email can be downloaded to my email client and sorted into folders via my email program, Eudora. It is the non-POP email that gets tedious, but luckily I only have two of those left: work and Yahoo (no, I won’t pay to have Yahoo download). I have adopted the standard of not checking those accounts but once a week. I figure if my company really needs to get hold of me, they have my client email address, and I only use Yahoo as the address when I order something online.

Next I started looking at the POP accounts. My personal email, my volunteer account, and my domain emails end up there. I have filters set up in Eudora to put them in the folders they need to go in for processing

I have my regular GMail set up to pop download as well, but I don’t do that very often. My GMail is used mainly for my newsgroups, so I leave those up on the server.

Upon reflection, I could do away with the GMail accounts for my domains and have them forward to my regular GMail account, but I don’t want to do that — mainly because I want to have a copy of all correspondence for these domains in one place without mixing it with other non-essential stuff.

I could probably get rid of my “anonymous” GMail address, since I rarely use it. Gone!

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