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How to deal with too many mail accounts?

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
2) I could use my mail client, mail.app, to filter mail for all the pop3 accounts, but it seems counter-intuitive to download mail from pop3 to mail.app, which will upload it back into my .mac based folders for me to download again.

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.
Cheers.

jason.mcbrayer's picture

PGP requires use of the...

Scottw;10111 wrote:

PGP requires use of the individual user to install software and make use of it. SPF is handled by domain administrators and mail administrators - average users have no control.

All the more reason SPF is useless as an anti-spam tool. Users have no control over whether their ISP is implementing SPF, but the ways in which they are allowed to send legitimate mail are affected by their ISP's choice. Most users probably wont even know whether they are supposed to comply with SPF's restrictions.

SPF is an tool for preventing Joe-jobs --- it has some use in preventing spammers from forging the return domain on their mail (leaving aside the issue of DNS cache poisoning that can be used to evade that). But it doesn't do anything to prevent spam per se -- this article explains why. Indeed, research has shown that more spam domains are using SPF than non-spam domains, because spammers are much more motivated to get around aggressive anti-spam techniques than non-spammers are. As an anti-forgery tool, SPF doesn't do anything to address what makes spam spam -- its unsolicited and bulk nature. And it has serious follow-on implications for email architecture that have never been adequately addressed.

The fact that average users have no control over whether or not they are expected to comply with SPF just makes the problem worse. An antispam measure that 1) doesn't work, and 2) makes life more difficult for non-spamming end-users (as you admit) is not an anti-spam measure which deserves to be adopted. It is appealing to some ISPs more as a lock-in tool against their users more than anything else.

Please read this Frequently Given Answer as to why you should not implement SPF.

 
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