Why yet another email management article?
I am writing this article because, in my work, I have met many people who still struggle with managing their emails, and I can suggest a reasonably simple solution.
The problem
Online communication still requires an email address. From making purchases to setting up a subscription and staying in touch with your audience, you will need to use email.
The wrong solution for this is to use your personal account for all situations. The main reason people use this is that it is convenient. There is one account to check, one password to remember, one email client, to learn to use. It is hard to argue against these advantages. But there are serious drawbacks as well.
- You expose your personal email to spammers. The logic is quite simple: the more places you use an email address, the more likely that some spammers will find it.
- It also becomes harder to keep track of email and categorize it based on purpose: subscriptions, business, personal, marketing, etc. Everything piles up in one big inbox.
- There are some privacy concerns. Using the same email everywhere allows data tracking algorithms to follow you around and to infer some usage patterns that you may not want to be exposed. But even more fundamental than that, you may want to avoid online stackers and trolls by being very careful with whom you share your personal email.
A better solution is to use different emails for different purposes. It is keeping things separate. While this solves all of the problems above, it creates a big hassle with having to check multiple email accounts, managing various passwords, and using different email clients.
The Best of Both Worlds
If you make good use of auto-forwarders and filters, you can have the best of both solutions.
With auto-forwarders, you collect all of the emails into one central account. (For advanced users I recommend POP3 pooling instead, as it is better when handling SPAM.) The best way to create forwarders is to use the “Forwarders” feature for your hosting provider or email provider.
The second part is to use filters into your main account, you categorize, label and organize the incoming email based on the email address it was actually sent to. E.g., email that was forwarded from the business email goes into the business folder, emails from the customer care address will go into a customer care folder, and so on.
The way you choose to organize your inbox is up to you, but you now have the power to do so because even though all email arrives in your main inbox, you know where it came from.
Now that incoming email is sorted out, how about outgoing?
Most email services allow you to configure “aliases” that will hide your main account email. In effect, this will enable you to “Send email As…” The power of this approach is that you can also send all of your emails from your favorite client, as long as you use the proper “Send Email As…” when you need to communicate from a different email account.
The Short Recipe
1. Create different emails for different purposes
2. Setup auto-forwards to collect all the email into your main account
3. Use Aliases/Identities/Send As features to send email from the main account but “as if” from a different account
4. Use filters in your main account to organize the incoming email
The Discipline
For this to work, you need to be disciplined and follow this process. If you are in a rush, you may be tempted to use your main account when someone asks for your email. It is best to have a “disposable” account on hand for this situation. An account that is already configured. This way, you will avoid the temptation to share your main email account because you can’t be bothered to set up a new email.
What other strategies do you use to keep spam out of your inbox and organize your email accounts?
