How to Manage your Email Easily and Mobile (up to 5 accounts)

As you can imagine, I recieve a lot of emails, and most of them I don’t get around to replying to until its either too late, or someone is laying flowers at their graveside because they’ve died from the wait. Of course this isn’t deliberate, it’s just a fact of life that we get more emails than we can reply to, this usually comes from a combination of factors.

• Spam Email
• Multiple Email Addresses & Accounts
• Email being the main form of contact
• Loosing old emails
• Forgeting which emails have been acted on, and which havent

This is where I decided to try and do something about it. I originally tried Gmail via invite when it was in beta, to be honest I was a bit worried about privacy issues and at that time I found the whole thing a bit rubbish. But now I’ve returned, I set up my google mail account, and it’s great. Why? Well simply because now all my email is managed in one place, and I know which they have come from easily via the labels I’ve set up.

Way’s to do this – Setting up Google Mail as Mail Client

You can do this a couple of ways, first way is to set up Google as your mail client, and retrieve all mail into that place, it checks every so often, pretty frequently, and pulls in new mail, with labels to tell you where they came from. You can set up 5 email accounts in this way, without the need for a paid account. You can then choose it to delete the orignal emails from there relative accounts so that you don’t end up duplicating all the emails, and having to login every so often to delete them all. It’s great, because you Google Mail cleverly allows you to reply to emails as the email address they sent it to. Example:

1. You get sent an email to blah@blah.com from joe@blah.com
2. You retrieve blah@blah.com in your Google Mail Account at blah@googlemail.com
3. You reply to the email from joe@blah.com AS blah@blah.com.
4. The recipient doesn’t know any real difference as it appears as it came from the same email address it was sent to.

Method 2 invovles forwarding your email to your Google Mail account, this works, but the trouble is it leave a copy on your orignal mail account. This leave it open to you having to remember to return to the email accounts and delete the emails out, ensuring that you don’t delete the most recent ones you might not yet have on your Google Mail account. It works, and is certainly a viable option if  you have more than 5 mail accounts, and want to still manage it all from Google Mail.

Benefits of Google Mail

Conversations – where Google Mail groups any reply emails into ‘forum like’ threads, and any new emails are added to your latest emails in your inbox, with the rest of the conversations hidden, viewable from 1 click to remind yourself what they were about.

Archive email – other providers have similar alternatives, but whats handy is the search function works really well, searching for terms within emails, from certain people and more. Google suggests, and promotes that you don’t need to delete any emails, perhaps to make you fill up the generous 7gb of space!

Save your hard drive – with the 7gb of hard drive, if you recieve a lot of mail, it saves your own server or other maximum inbox, worth it.

Spam Filter – this spam filter is spot on 99% of the time, I rarely see one get through, this saves a lot of time, not having to delete them manually.

It’s webmail – combine it with your mobile phone, and always have an up-to-date email inbox.