Reducing Inboxes in 2005: Part V - Email

Welcome to Simple Productivity Blog! You may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. This will allow you to receive updates in your RSS reader every time new content is posted here. If you want to receive updates in your email, click on the envelope in the upper right corner, or use the "Subscribe" link below the blog title.

Please take some time to check out the content on the site. You may comment on any article by scrolling down and using the form at the bottom of all articles. Thanks for visiting!

Originally published October 2006

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. I’m not even sure how some of them came about…but when I did a count, this is how it broke down:

• Work-related: 1 for client #1, 1 for client #2, 1 corporate account, 1 hotmail account set up when the above 3 didn’t work
• Home: 1 personal through DSL, 1 family account through DSL, 1 through dial-up ISP, kept to access newsgroups
• Volunteer: 1 webmaster account, 1 “alternate” account
• Other: 1 yahoo account, 3 email accounts through various organizations

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 was the non-POP email that was getting tedious - and these included the clients, my corporate account (I know, don’t ask, it’s a “corporate policy”), Yahoo, Hotmail and the 3 organizational accounts.

Obviously, I can’t get rid of the client or corporate email. However, I did work it so that I don’t have to check the client email when I am not there. That limits those accounts. I was recently shown a method to get my corporate email copied to another email, so that eliminates that problem (more on this later).

Hotmail? I only got the address so that my clients could contact me during email problems about 3 years ago. Solution? GONE! The 3 organizational accounts? Since these were offered as a perk of membership and I never used them, I closed them all.

Yahoo I kept, because this is where I get all information delivered pertaining to orders, etc. In other words, those places that are likely to sell my address or send spam.

POP

Next I started looking at the POP accounts. Even if I could automatically get the email all in once place, why did I need so many addresses? The answer is I don’t. I could easily turn off all but the personal and primary volunteer address. But that would leave all my newsgroups flooding my accounts, and forcing me to process things I prefer to have as reading material rather than things to take action on. The shared account was used for 2 Internet sites that we all use. (GONE!)

Enter GMail

Enter Google. I received at this time an offer to try out GMail. This service offers two main benefits: 1) a huge amount of disk space, so that you never have to delete, and 2) the ability to filter the email.

So my solution is to have 3 remaining addresses: my personal, my primary volunteer account, and my GMail account. My volunteer account handles the things for the volunteer position. My personal account is personal email and things to process. My GMail account handles the rest, from library notices to catching corporate email to receiving all newsgroups.

So 13 email accounts down to 6. Pretty good, in my opinion.

Related Articles

• Reducing Inboxes in 2005: Part I
• Reducing Inboxes in 2005: Part II - Voice Mail
• Reducing Inboxes in 2005: Part III - Physical Inboxes
• Reducing Inboxes in 2005: Part IV - Electronic Input