Over the years I’ve used many, MANY email clients. Anybody remember MCIMail? How about email on VAX/VMS? mailx, pine, elm, mutt, Eudora, the OS X mail client. These days I use fastmail.fm as my primary email service provider. It’s not exactly pretty, but they have more that what I need in an email service. In fact I use them for all my DNS, too.
But where do I actually read/compose email? Gmail.
These days, the only thing that fastmail does with my email is forward it to my gmail account. (Well, actually it also provides a layer of spam-deflection.)
Why do I use gmail for all my email? Two reasons: “archive” and “conversations”. Why doesn’t any other email interface organize emails properly into conversations? I’ve used many email interfaces that organize emails into threads, but they never seemed to actually be useful. More annoying than useful, really.
And the reason that “archive” works is the combination of virtually infinite storage, and, more importantly, search that works. All the other email interfaces that I used it was always really hard to find anything once it left my inbox. I’d use folders to “organize”, etc, but still could never find old emails.
So, to get to the real point. With gmail I like to keep my inbox clean (i.e., empty). They trouble is that I still get so much email that it’s hard to keep up and keep it clean.
Today I changed my cleaning strategy. Usually I like to go through all the emails and archive them. The point is to find stuff that I need to do something about. One variation of this is to scan thru the email subjects selecting stuff to delete and archive and doing so.
So, the new strategy is this: (1) select ALL messages in the inbox, (2) look for anything that looks like I need to read it/act on it and deselect those, (3) archive anything left selected.
