Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.
How to deal with too many mail accounts?
Chage | Aug 5 2007
Hi All, I am starting to pull my hair out over mail productivity. Not because of too much mail, but because I have too many mail accounts. I have accounts from my ISP, Gmail, Work, Personal, .mac totaling about a dozen. Trying to find value in paying for .mac, I want to try and get all mail going to may .mac account. However there is a gotcha or two. 1) .mac will not allow you to have outbound email aliases for non .mac addresses So an email to Merlin advised that people on the forums were pretty smart and o ask them :) 1) Should I go down the path of forwarding email addresses to one account, or should I just keep to the status quo? 2) reply-to vs from: am I old fashioned in thinking from is better? 3) if responding true to 2), is there a script that can be run with mail.app to automagically fill out the reply-to field with the recipient email address when I hit reply? 4) Maybe I should forward email, but keep existing accounts just for sending? 5) What other options/opinions :) OK folks, have at it. I look forward to any advise you can give. 19 Comments
POSTED IN:
 Many problems exist when bringing...Submitted by Scottw on August 22, 2007 - 11:27am.
Many problems exist when bringing webmail in the consolidation picture. Primarily, SPF. With spam reduction policies, typically domain owners will specify which outgoing mail servers are allowed to originate email for them. This means even your webmail solution allowed you to specify 30 different FROM addresses that you can send as, all email sent from those 29 other addresses could be classified as SPAM and undeliverable simply by a SPF violation. With a mail client like Mail.app, you don't have these concerns. When you change the FROM address to a different email, it will send out the configured gateway for that domain, regardless if the email came into a different account. If you have 30 personal accounts floating around, choose the one you want to be your primary, forward them all to that one and when you respond to emails, respond with your "primary" account, and eventually you will get all your email to that account. Work email, if you work for a company/university, should be separate for many different reasons. You will not always have that account, you don't risk mixing personal emails on company accounts, or vise-versa. Since I am self-employed, I use one address of my own domain, for personal and business. While I may have some "general" addresses, they forward to my primary account. While I have some external accounts like gmail, .Mac, etc... I only use these for rare occasions I don't want to use my personal address/domain. Typically, they are for registration, and if the forward to my personal account, that's okay, because I will never respond t those. If I do need too, I will typically do it via Mail.app, and it will send through the correct SMTP server. If I need to do it via webmail, I will use the webmail service offered by the mail provider for that domain. So, the solution is to merge your zones email accounts. If you have 10 personal accounts, merge them into a primary. Perhaps register your own domain and sign up for cheap 3.95/month hosting somewhere where you can have your own webmail and 20GB of mail IMAP space. Forward all your accounts to that personal account, reply as that personal account. Leave your work address for work, and your university address for university stuff. Don't give out your university for personal emails. If you have a RARE email from one of those accounts, you can always forward it to your primary account, and then worst case, you have to log into the other mail account to respond, so your SPF records are good. » POSTED IN:
|
|
| EXPLORE 43Folders | THE GOOD STUFF |
