Previously I had the $20/yr yahoo mail with a filter on it that put every msg with FWD in the subject line into a separate mail folder, but I didn’t renew, so now everything goes into my inbox.

If this post is completely inappropriate for this forum, don’t hesitate to not post it. I just thought I would ask while I was here.

BTW Gmail does allow you to add tags to your received mail. I set up tags such as “Need to follow up”, “Need to reply”, “Adoption Search Help”, etc. [I am an adoptee ISO bParents. After 18 months of internet searching, I'm not any closer than when I started.]

Lisa Kay
FL Adoptee
Born Jan 1963 – Gainesville, Florida

It can get to be seriously overwhelming, but I have kept it under control up to now. I use POP3 access and Mozilla Thunderbird to keep all of my mail sorted. It integrates VERY well with gmail. In fact, it has built-in support for gmail.

I have all of my site admin, tech, abuse, root, personal, blog, notification emails set up in different folders on my computer, and when I pull my email from the server, Thunderbird sorts everything for me.

I would suggest that this is the best way to deal with the “overkill” of all those emails. If you’re really geeky, you could even set up IMAP access to gmail, but I’m not that geeky yet.

The upside is that gmail will filter the spam for you, and you download your inbox. The downside is that gmail filters your spam for you, and you download ONLY your inbox. I hate that. I wish I could turn off the gmail spam filtering and let Thunderbird do it for me. But that’s a common complaint about gmail.

The biggest benefit to using a local mail program is the ability to pull emails from many, many accounts at once and sort them as you need them to be sorted. It really helps set priorities. Anything that I get that comes addressed to my abuse@ address gets set to highest priority, and I can see that immediately. I can also set specific email addresses to different priorities and folders. It’s sweet!

Dump the web mail interface, fire up Thunderbird, or if you really must — Outlook, and get to sorting.

You’ll never go back to the web mail interface again.

w00t!

Having folders like you mentioned is what I do and it works really well, although it’s still time consuming to sort each email into the corresponding folders so I try to apply as many rules to incoming messages as possible that auto-sort them.

I am slowly getting to grips with the emails. I was thinking of having a few sorting folders , like Important/Needs a reply/Doesn’t need a reply/Archive/Trash.

That way to organise my emails and then reply to all of them that need replying to. These should be in my “needs a reply folder”.

B

I have been using a kool P2P based solution called Collanos that keeps files, correspondences, links, etc. in shared workspaces that are mirror images of my team mates Collanos workspaces. Each folder is designated for a certain purpose and each project has a different team.
I believe this solution alone has restored order in my professional and personal correspondes and work and reduced the number of emails in my Inbox by 500 a week!

I use Windows Live Mail to help sort my email. I use three different email accounts that I can view all in that one program. Gmail is what I sign up to newsletters and other sites with. That’s the address all my blog comments and website email addresses get forwarded to.

I also have hotmail which some of my friends have, and I use that to sign up for newsletters of my competitors. I check them out when I want to see what they’re up to but if that inbox gets backed up it’s not a big deal to just select all, then delete.

I also have an email address with my local ISP that only my friends, family, and close contacts have. If I see any email in that inbox I know it’s important. On every account I have filters and labels in place so that things (like new subscribers, lead reports, etc.) go directly into folders that I can look at later if I want.

Now that I have this little system in place (which is not perfect but it works for now) it helps to keep the unimportant ones out of view so I can focus on the emails that need a quick response.