David.R.Gilson

How to become an e-mail ninja – Part 1

Nov 3

How-To Guides David 3 Comments
e-mail, imap, inbox zero, lifehacking, merlin mann, microsoft, mozilla, online life, outlook, pop, productivity, thunderbird

Approximate reading time is 2 minutes

Introduction

We all depend on e-mail these days, most of the world runs on it. It’s definitely something we all take for granted, although it’s a lot more complicated than most of us realise. This series of posts will cover the pro’s and cons of whether you should download it to your home computer or keep it in the cloud and also how to keep on top of your e-mail, and not let your e-mail get on top of you!

Part 1 discusses the good and bad points of getting your mail downloaded to your home computer. Part 2 goes into more sophisticated methods that allow you to have your e-mail stored at home, but still accessible from anywhere. Part 3 then talks about how you process your incoming e-mail and keep your inbox from overflowing!

Part 1

E-mail, accessing it and storing it, has always been a bit of a preoccupation with me.

Given that e-mail can be so important, and personal I’ve always felt strongly that I wanted to maintain ownership of it (let’s face it, e-mail is as much a part of our identity as handwritten letters once were). “Maintaining ownership” of your mail largely rules out using any form of web mail (Like Gmail or Hotmail) because if your web mail provider disappears, then so does all that important e-mail you were hanging onto. So instead, you can go with good old fashioned POP mail, which you probably get with your ISP.

POP (Post office Protocol) allows you to download mail to your computer, and usually the mail is deleted on the server as you get it. You certainly have ownership of your e-mail now. Although beware, because you are then responsible for keeping it safe. Now ask yourself, when did you last do a back-up?

Then the next problem is accessibility. How many times have you been away from your own computer and for some reason needed to see your e-mail? If you wanted to check for a new message, then it’s not so much of a problem. If you’re near a web connected computer then sites like mail2web.com will do the job for you, or maybe your mobile carrier provides some sort of WAP portal to external mail accounts.

Although, what if you want to remind yourself of something in a mail you had already read at home? Well, you’re probably out of luck because that mail is gone from your POP server and now only exists on your computer, where you left it, at home. The only way you can get around this is to start fiddling with your home e-mail program setting up all kinds of rules for when and how messages are deleted from server. Still though, at some point your messages are likely to be deleted your POP server, and when they do, you can’t put them back, so your your old mail is then confined to your hard drive.

Stay tuned for part 2 where I’ll tell you how you can have the best of both worlds.

Part Two >>