Email Solutions.

If your anything like me you have way to many email accounts, and can’t seem to cut them down either.

I have a total of 6 email addresses I’ve had for many years, they are for various companys I have worked for or started or even work supplied accounts for getting spam. ;)
To keep track of all my emails I use a combination of Google’s Gmail, and IMAP folders.

POP Accounts: gmail, yahoo, work2, rogers. Rogers is the address I received from my ISP and I use it for receiving bills, and spam from Rogers, the work2 account is another one that was setup by the company who writes the software we use at work, it’s mainly there for them to send spam. Yahoo is my email address I give out to all web forms, and web forums and is basically a spam trap. Gmail is my personal email address that friends and family use to contact me.

Imap accounts: Personal, work1. The personal account is my previous main email address for personal and business use from the last company I ran. The server is running Exchange, but I connect to it via IMAP for something more “standard”. Currently this email address mainly gets spam from old wholesalers, and I receive enough personal email that it’s worth keeping online, I also have 8 gigs of stored messages in IMAP folders for this account! Work1 is my main work email address for my existing job, again all messages are saved in IMAP folders on this account.

Consolidation: I’ve thought long and hard over this, and came up with a solution that seems to work great! I’ve configured Gmail to get all email for my POP accounts. It grabs, work2, yahoo, rogers and does it’s google magic to them. Gmail’s spam filter is amazing so that cuts down on a lot of issues there, not to mention the fact that when I use my email clients to grab POP mail from Gmail it is all auto archived for searching. I have also added my
Configuring email clients: I use a total of 2 email clients, Agendus SSL on my Treo 650, and Mail.app on my imac. (I also have Thunderbird configured on my USB key for accessing mail from my laptop). Now you just need to configure 2 addresses, your IMAP work address, and the Gmail address.

If you check mail on your handheld and want to respond later from a full size keyboard, it no longer matters if your email client is configured to remove them from the server as Gmail archives everything!

Works for me!