I have lived in the world of technology since 1982. I saw both email and the Internet develop into powerful tools. I have also been blogging for almost five years and continue to use most of the useful social networks.
I gave a seminar last week at the Emerald Isle Parks and Recreation Center. I used my laptop to present. One of the participants noticed my inbox and was horrified to see that I had gotten perhaps one hundred emails that day.
I do not get half the emails that I used to receive when I was a manager at Apple Computer. There were days at Apple when I got two or three hundred emails. At a certain point all I could do was hold my hands on the monitor and use Vulcan mind meld.
Since leaving Apple and going through a variety of careers, the last being as a Realtor® on the Crystal Coast of North Carolina, I have developed a reliable system for handling email.
It does not involve tedious filing of email into folders. There are just not enough hours in the day for that even at my much reduced one hundred emails a day.
My solution is multiple email accounts.
I have a personal email account using one of Google's free domains. My wife and some of my family and a friend or two have also taken advantage of my domain which Google will let support up to twenty email accounts. I try to keep most of personal mail with family and close friends in this account. We also do most of our online chatting through this account. I have chosen the IMAP option which allows me to easily have access the same mail at multiple computers. It also has a good webmail interface which lets me get at my mail from any secure computer.
I have a number of old clients and friends from Apple. I actually have a special email account for them. It used to cost me $9.95 per year, but it is now free. It is also IMAP based so again there is no problem using it with different computers.
Bluewater GMAC Real Estate, the company where I work provides me with an IMAP account hosted by MailTrust where I used to work. All of my internal company communications stays within this account.
Since I used to work with MailTrust, I also have another account with them. I actually purchased it before I went to work with them. I got it when I was a consultant for National Lambda Rail. I have kept it and use it for all my official communication with clients. Of course it is also IMAP.
I also have a .Mac account which I use mostly for subscriptions and paying for things. It is my ecommerce account. It is also IMAP.
I regularly use one other account which is attached to my main domain CoastalNC.org. It is a POP account, and I use it for a contact point for a few blogs, some friends who infrequently communicate, and some local people whom I want to focus on that particular domain. It probably gets about 2% of my email. It is reliable and does have a good webmail interface, but of course being POP, you have to be careful with the settings on multiple computers.
This system works for me on Macs and Windows. I use Apple's Mail on my Macs. I use Thunderbird on Windows XP and Outlook on Vista. On Linux I only use my Gmail account but I do have Thunderbird configured. I just do not use it often.
About once every six months, I spend a couple of hours moving IMAP messages from servers to my desktop. Once in a while I will take an important mailbox that I have archived and make a copy to an external hard drive, and it put it on my server at home. That is a rare event these days, and I suspect that I need to do it even less.
I have managed to keep most of my important email on servers that other people back up.
Most people do not get the kind of email that I do, but many people do have business and personal email.
I highly recommend that you at a minimum separate the two. I am a contractor where I work so I feel it is necessary for me to own my business email. I do not want the company to own my mail. I am fine with them owning the communication between me and them, just not between me and my clients.
It is very easy to get a free Gmail account and put your personal mail there. Just follow this link and you will be set in a few minutes.
Next if you need serious email for business, buy your own domain and start building your brand. MailTrust is a very reliable company and you can get three 10 gig email boxes for a total of $9 per month. Your domain will cost $30 or so from MailTrust, but you will have better email than you get through any ISP.
For most people this will serve them very well. If you want to make your life a little easier get a third account and keep your ecommerce in that account. Then when you get an email in your business email saying that your bank account has been compromised, you will know that it is fake because you do not use that email account for ecommerce.
My next post will tackle my thoughts on social networking.
