The Big Mail Experiment
Email is a huge part of my life as I currently have 9 accounts comprising of my personal Mobile Me account, an account for each of my companies MDN, Mamooba and Streambyte. An account for the church , my personal newsletter and some a number of accounts for other organizations I am a part of.
When using Mail.app on “OS X” all this is fine as it offers a merged inbox to work with however when checking email on the iPhone (which is something I do more and more) I have to look at all 9 inboxes to check mail.
So I began to see what I could do to solve this problem and like most things in my life my solution became bigger than my original problem and turned into an experiment.
I have basically abandoned all of my existing email IMAP accounts and set them all up to forward to a new gmail account. Gmail has a feature called “Send As” which allows me to send email out as though it was coming from any of my existing accounts
While doing all this I took the complex array of IMAP folders I had under all these accounts and simplified them down to just 2 under my GMail account, Action and File.
Now when an email comes in it is either read, actioned, replied to if possible or needed then moved to the File folder, read actioned, replied to if needed or possible and deleted or if something needs to be done with it I cant do right now it gets moved to the Action folder. An email should never be read twice while in the inbox.
When I get a moment I go through the emails in my Action folder and either do what I need to do with it then move it to the File folder or create an action for the task in omniFocus then move the email to the File folder. Either way an email should not be touched in the Action folder more than once. Moving everything I need to save to a single File folder means I will now rely on search to find archived email which is actually what I was doing before even though stuff had been sorted in folders. If I have to search for it why organise it in the first place.
I am experimenting with only using Google’s web interface on both the Mac and the iPhone. I have set myself the goal of doing this until the 1st of Jan 2010 just so if I abandon it I know its because I can’t make it work for me rather than I just didn’t try very hard. The advantage of doing this is I will also use the same interface on any machine and become efficient where ever I am.
November 19th, 2009 at 4:59 am
Hey Scotty
Good deal — I switched over to purely web based about two years ago on the desktop (well I use mailplane which is a must have for serious gmail use) and I could not be happier.
I switched initially because I had three computers (PC at work, mac pro for main development and MBP for travel) and keeping track of emails was otherwise impossible.
What I found out pretty quickly was I was actually faster and better at dealing with email using the web interface — Especially once you memorize the shortcuts (hit ? to see them) you can plow through mail amazingly fast.
What suprised me was I’m not 100% web based on the iPhone also using the Gmail iPhone web page. The fact that you can star messages, file, etc. and it’s automatically in the account is hard to beat.
I doubt you’ll go back once you get going wih it.
December 19th, 2009 at 12:09 am
I’ve tried something similar with my godaddy e-mail account. I use pop accounts. However i’ve run afoul of the smtp’s spf. E-mail sent to one of my other accounts bounce when finally reaching my godaddy e-mail account.
I have all my e-mail accounts forward to this one account. I also write all e-mail out of that account changing the value of the from field.
Most recipients are able to reply without trouble, however some are not.
Would using IMAP make a difference?