Email Simplification

Posted on | December 24, 2010 | 2 Comments

“Hello, my name is Annie, and I’m addicted to the Internet.”

It definitely seems that way sometimes, especially when I catch myself in that loop of checking each and every one of my darned email accounts.

Over the years I have built up quite a collection of them, and having this site gave me a few more. While I am slowly migrating over to the email on this site, I still use and have a need to check messages in the other accounts.

This leads to what I call the loop. I will stop work, go to Gmail, then Yahoo, then Hotmail, then my ISP email, then the individual email accounts for this site (admin and personal). Before I know it I have wasted up to an hour just checking emails, most of which get deleted!

In a previous post I mentioned that I am now using Microsoft Office and really enjoying it, so I got the idea to send ALL of my email to this one application. This way instead of checking my mail constantly, flittering from one site to another I have a program that does it automatically and lets me know if I have something new.

My main concern was having access to my emails if I was away from my pet laptop, or losing important emails in the event of a computer failure. IMAP solved those issues, and now all of my email except for Yahoo is being delivered to my inbox automatically. My ISP does not support IMAP, but since I generally only send newsletters and stuff to it I am not so concerned with just having POP3 access.

There is a program called YPOPS that is supposed to enable you to check your Yahoo email in Outlook and other programs, but I have yet to successfully configure it. Should that program work I will have a one-stop shop for all of my email, hopefully saving a LOT of time as a result.

There are free programs out there that can be used to check email: Mozilla Thunderbird is one of them, while Eudora is another popular option. If you have multiple email accounts setting them all up as IMAP will enable you to continue having the mobility of a web-based email client while freeing you up from having to manually log into each and every individual site.

I am a bit lost with the extra time on my hands; now after I obsessively check Facebook and Twitter I’m done and go back to work. I will definitely be more productive with the extra time on my hands!

While I would like to have a single email account for everything, the life I lead online makes that impossible unless I want to constantly wade through a bunch of junk. Multiple email addresses was my solution, and now I have a way to save a LOT of time maintaining them.

What have you done to simplify your online life?

NOTE: Here is a top 10 list of free email programs.  Enjoy!

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