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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
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 My solutionSubmitted by MEP on October 4, 2007 - 6:50pm.
I don't use .mac but I do use FastMail which is also IMAP. I also have several other email addresses all of which allow either POP, IMAP or both. Replace FastMail with .mac in my explanation and you'll get the idea. What I do is: 1) Set up my FastMail IMAP account as my primary account. I'm ultimately going to archive all of my mail on my IMAP account. 2) I set up Mail.app to check all of my other mail accounts, I don't forward anything. 3) I check my mail in Mail.app's unified inbox, but each account goes into it's own inbox behind the scenes. 4) Most of my mail gets deleted during processing, what little I do archive all gets saved in my "Archive" folder on my FM IMAP account. This is extremely easy as IMAP folders basically behave like any other folder through Mail.app's interface. I use MailActOn to speed the processing and MailTags to organize everything in my archive folder, but you could just as easily set up a folder hierarchy if that's your bag. 5) I set up a unique personality for each of the email addresses I want to use for outgoing mail. Each of these personalities uses the SMTP server settings most appropriate to that address. For instance, an alias on my FM account uses FM's SMTP servers, but my gmail address uses Gmail's SMTP servers. 6) Everything works great. The initial setup takes some effort, but once it's up and running, it's like having one email address. If I forwarded all of my mail to FM, it would count against my bandwidth quota just as much as uploading my mail to the archive via IMAP does except that FM would get all of my mail instead of only receiving the messages I want to archive. As long as your internet connection is pretty snappy, you shouldn't notice any delay or other problems. I don't see why doing it this way should be counter-intuitive. » POSTED IN:
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