For the past couple of weeks, I have been working on a multitude of projects which require a tremendous amount of correspondence via email. With all these different types of projects comes a variety of different types of email accounts - Multiple GMail Accounts, Hotmail, Yahoo and more than 5 different domain based email addresses. What I’ve found is that checking all these emails have really made this sort of communication the new snail mail of our generation!
Why so many email addresses?
Personal (GMail): I use this to communicate with friends and family and get my evites for fun non-internet related events.
Business (GMail): I use this to register for all my main services like my hosting and and affiliate programs.
Spam (Hotmail): For all those contests or promotions that require email to enter. I use it more to research how these contests are working so I can put my own twist to it.
Domain based Emails (gary@example.com): I have a lot of sites where when I communicate on behalf of the site. My rule is that when communicating to vendors for a website, try and use the domain to show a level of authenticity so that the vendors will take you more seriously.
How do I check and organize my emails?
Mail.app - This is the program that comes standard in Leopard and is a pretty decent mail system if I was only using one computer for all my jobs. The reality is that I move between at least 3 different computers throughout the day so my best solution should be a web based email program.
GMail - I thought this would be my solution since GMail has a feature to check all your emails and to also send all your emails. From what I’ve seen, the feature works like Google promotes, but the problem is that I don’t get my emails right away, so when someone is emailing me to my other accounts, I don’t receive it until 15-45 minutes later. In our fast paced life, this is definitely a problem.
I haven’t found a solution yet for my email woes, but hopefully, I’ll figure something out. While writing this post, I found some stuff on .Mac’s iSync. I’ll go check that out and see if that’s something that can work better than GMail. For now, I’m just gonna have to deal with the sloth of the snail unless you have something you could suggest?
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I only use POP3 emails straight through my servers. I don’t have a gmail acct, and I still have a hotmail acct only for personal stuff. ALL of my emails are in mail.app, with the option turned ON to leave copies on the server in case I need web-based access.
One thing I had briefly experimented with was to use a portable version of Thunderbird on a thumb drive. I went back to my current web-based mail clients because I was having issues with Thunderbird being blocked by the firewall at work.
Guys,
Check out IMAP. I have all of my email accounts (including GMail) set up as IMAP and not POP3. This way, regardless of my OS (Linux, Windows, Flash Drive) or client (Thunderbird, Mail, Evolution) I have the latest info.
IMAP will reflect any changes on the server (and not just the clients). If you create a folder, move a message or even read/reply to a message, that change is made at the server level. That means that, if you check your mail at work (say, XP & Outlook) each account will be updated so when you get home (OSX & Mail) read messages will be marked as so!
Best of all, use a flash drive (encrypt it with TrueCrypt) and set up portable Thunderbird so you can travel with your mail! If you’re at your mom’s house or the library, messages will still be updated!!!!
Check it out, you will thank me!
When I first read the title of your post, I thought you were looking at email from another angle. I thought that email had become too slow for your liking. A lot of us live in a faster-paced world now with things like twitter and all those other add-ons on blogs. About gmail, I didn’t realize that it processed mail slowly. the reason why I opened a gmail account is because someone told me that attachment was quick and that you get to send and receive messages on time. Anyway, I’m fairly new to gmail so I guess I’ll just have to wait and observe.
It indeed is a problem, especially with all the spam out there clogging up cyberspace. I tend to stick to just a couple of accounts and forward the rest to those accounts to help keep things manageable. That way I only log into secondary accounts when it is absolutely necessary.