Inbox Heaven: The Ultimate Email Setup

I have about 12 email addresses all pointed to one Gmail account with the ability to “send mail as” for each address.

Man I love the Goog.

Twelve! That’s a scary amount. What sort of dark alternative lives are you hiding, Jay? :) No, wait — I’m not sure I want to know!

Let’s just say if I accidentally put “Batman” in that Name box up above, it wouldn’t be far off.

…actually I just like to create a new Gmail address for each of the sites I maintain. Sounds strange, but it actually makes the organization easier for me.

I use your method, Nick, and it works. Living proof and testimonials and all that stuff. Gmail *rocks* if you use it properly and to its fullest potential.

I’ll add a tip for Firefox users – go get the Signature plugin. From anywhere in your email, one right click lets you select the best signature for the email address you’re using for your reply.

Now, the only thing that’s missing on Gmail is the ability to have a signature that rocks with a little bit of bling. Any ideas, Nick?

Nice post, but:

1. What should I do with the hundreds of archived emails I have (and need) in Outlook right now?
2. And what if I need to go back to some email for reference material, information on a project, or some other detail, and I don’t have internet at the moment?

These are the 2 points I’m most curious about.

@Jay: That makes sense. I’d not thought of using a single Gmail account in that way to check other Gmail accounts. Good plan!

@James: Another Gmail convert! You’re all crawling out of the network at last. Thanks for the Signature plugin tip. It was all that was missing for me! The experience is now complete. The plugin is here: Signature Plugin for Firefox

@Yaili: Migrating from Outlook will be a gradual process if you’ve got hundreds of archived emails. When I migrated to web-based Gmail from Mail.app, I would occassionally have to fire up Mail to retrieve some information, but over time, I used the old archive less and less.

Just start using web-based Gmail today, and treat Outlook as a library of your more dusty email. Disconnect it from the net so it’s no longer checking email when you fire it up and use it for reference only.

Re: referring to email without a ‘net connection. I can honestly say it’s never been a problem for me. I print out or make notes from any emails I need whenever I go to a meeting. I also have Gmail Mobile on my phone — you can access archived and starred email from it too, and search through the lot. It’s really very powerful.

To sum up: you’ll probably find connectivity isn’t a problem. Invest in the best local and mobile internet connections you can right now. If you work on the web, you owe it to yourself to have a cheap high-speed connection that’s always on, wherever you are.

As internet connectivity becomes even more universal, this will become less of a problem too. Thanks for chiming in and let us all know how it goes.

Yeah, I guess you’re right. I just bought a shiny new iPod touch that integrates smoothly with Gmail too. I just think the idea of having all our reference material stored in a virtual mailbox is still a strange concept for some of us to grasp (like having my files in G Docs).

Lifehacker offer a really awesome Firefox extension that I believe also includes adding signatures. It’s called Better Gmail 2.

@ Jay – Yeah, that’s a good one too. Unfortunately, it did my Gmail more harm than good when Gmail started frigging with the new and old version. I might test it out again, though, surely it works better now.

But no, I don’t think it includes adding signatures in the way that Signature does.

@James Yeah, you’re right. It doesn’t do the Sig. thing, but it does work beautifully with the new Gmail version.

Hate to spoil the fun, but how long does Google take to catch up? Granted, I just moved my e-mail accounts over this morning, but Google keeps showing me old messages as new. Then I went to check my e-mail by (gasp) actually logging into AOL and I find that I have new messages waiting. What’s the deal?

Gmail is very rapid, actually. We’ve tested it to see the lapse in time, and if it doesn’t arrive in seconds on a high-speed internet, then there is something wrong.

Keep in mind that Gmail is often not to blame. There are many PCs that have conflicting settings, plugins, addons and whatnot that affect other issues. For a while, my Gmail was absolute crap (right around the old version/new version time) and I was cursing them up and down.

A month later when I finally decided that I couldn’t work this way, I wiped my computer clean of plugins and addons and certain programs. The culprit? Not Gmail at all. Some innocent little THING screwed up my world.

@Yaili: I’ve not used the iPhone Gmail offering. Does it let you star email from the application? That would be pretty much essential for me. If not, I guess you could always use the web interface via Safari.

@Jay & James: I’ve used Better Gmail 2 and experienced some odd rendering quirks and crashes, but perhaps it’s better now. I’ll give it another shot. The Signatures plug-in is working nicely though.

@Mich: Gmail checks your other accounts every 10 minutes. (If you go the the accounts tab on your preferences page, you can show a history of retrieved messages by clicking “view history” next to the relevant account. You can also force it to check ahead of the 10 minute cycle by clicking “check mail now”.)

And yes, you might find the first time it checks your AOL inbox that some read mail will be marked as unread. Just deal with it in Gmail — once it’s synced again the second time all should be well. Sadly I don’t have an AOL account — let me know if you have any problems.

This is the funniest account of how to manage e-mail that I’ve ever read – and therefore the one I’m most likely to try and use :-)

I am still a bit worried that they might get the biscuits though…

I got put off the thought of gmail after I read about David Airey’s hacking saga

http://www.davidairey.co.uk/google-gmail-security-hijack/

Does your route to inbox heaven get us round this potential risk?

Joanna

Thanks Joanna. The security hijack thing scared me too, but it’s now been fixed with some help from the Gmail community. Details here: Gmail vulnerability fixed.

Don’t worry about your biscuits. Just keep them in a locked tin labelled, “not biscuits”. It fools the gremlins every time.

Great tips here. I was surprised to see how closely I was to the plan already. The only thing, I think I suffer from labelitis. Scheduling a dr. apt now. I’m going to give your suggestions a try.
I use a lot of filters. I don’t remember reading about that. Would you recommend them? What i do is filter it so it is automatically archived and labeled when it comes in. That way my inbox stays empty almost all the time. And all the related emails are grouped already when i go to deal with them.

@Nick – Good stuff. Laughing and enjoying a clever article on productivity is sooo much more entertaining than actually being productive.

I currently use most of the steps and have rules that auto label to sort by client. I like the idea of hierarchal labels with the dash. And starring before archiving for a to-do is a good idea. I’m off to tidy up my inbox.

p.s. what is a choclate hobnob?

@James – I use a greasemonkey plugin for the bling sig. If anyone knows of a more elegant solution please share.

http://blankcanvasweb.com/gmail2_html_sigs/

@Nathaniel – thanks! Filters are great — I use them too, but they’re not an essential part of Inbox Heaven. It’s very easy to get carried away; you can quickly spend most of your evenings thinking of new filters to apply to incoming mail. Few of them are foolproof, and there will always be something that slips through the net.

That’s why I concentrate on teaching people to clear out their inbox in an easy way, rather than fiddling with their settings and tinkering away. Automating the crap out of everything is great, but it’s like fighting a never-ending battle! You constantly have to think of new filters to automate every new case that comes your way. You might as well just file stuff yourself!

@Sterling – Thanks, man! Happy tidying. I can’t believe you haven’t experience the sweet ecstasy that is the chocolate Hobnob! I tell you, if I didn’t stand a good chance of getting locked up for posting a packet of what, in my opinion, should be reclassified from “biscuity snack” to “Class A drug”, I’d be off to the post office in a snap.

Image the softest, smoothest, oatiest biscuit you can dream of layered with a generous crust of milk chocolate. In England, if you’re common, you dip them in your tea. Mmmm, heaven!

I became blinded by sadness when they announced that they were to be discontinued but, thank goodness, it was a false alarm! (Read the gripping story and see a photo here: A Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down.)

I agree – don’t get carried away with labels and filters. I thought they were the greatest thing, wasted a whole day color coding all my labels, and lived happily for all of… three months. Now I have Harry going through my email to reduce the 60 labels that I have so I can actually find something.

More is not less.

@ Nick – Ikea’s oatmeal-chocolate sandwich cookie. Crispy, sweet, good. And I live nowhere near Ikea. It’s sad. Really it is.

James – exactly! Over-use labels and you’ll have Inbox Haystack instead of Inbox Heaven.

Ikea do biscuits now? Do they come pre-assembled?*

*Yes, it’s a cheap gag, but someone had to say it.

Of course this little wonder allows us to star emails! :)
It can be done either via the built-in mail app or Safari, but the app is much better.

Drat. That makes me want an iPhone! I really don’t need one though – I’m holding out for a phone that will run Android!

“When we’re done, people won’t even know you’ve sent it from Gmail.”

Is this true? I tried exactly this approach and all of the messages I sent show up to Outlook users as “…sent on behalf of…”. Now we all know that Outlook really is the work of the devil, but bearing in mind it’s used by the majority of the business community (i.e. my clients), this really makes this approach a bit of a no no for me :-(

If I’ve got it wrong, let me know because I’d love to work this way!

Great article! Does anyone know if there is a way to export emails or ‘conversations’ to text documents from Gmail? My present workflow is to organize email to project specific folders, then archive messages to a project folder when the project is complete. I like to keep a record of the client correspondence. I wasn’t able to find anything to support this after I had a quick look through the Gmail interface. Thoughts? Solutions?

Cheers!

@ Shannon – Exporting can’t be done. But there is a nice little trick…

Go into any email. Right click. Choose Save Page As and then select .txt file.

Want another? Open an email, go to Print and then when the print window opens, choose Print to PDF from the dropdown of available printers.

You can even zip those PDFs when you’re done for better file storage. :)

Thanks for the tips Nick … already trying my best to incorporate much of this, but always good to have encouragement. Sadly, it doesn’t work perfectly for all email accounts. Hotmail uses HTTP access (I know, there are way more reasons than that to ditch Hotmail, but for the moment I haven’t gathered the strength to do the mass change of address email on that account).

The other one I can’t do much about is my university email address. It is set up as an IMAP account, which Gmail can’t (yet) handle properly. If I could access other IMAP accounts in Gmail, I’d be golden. Anyone have any tips for that?

Incidentally, if people are out there who would like to archive old Outlook-bound email messages to Gmail, I have found a quick way. Set up Outlook to access Gmail via IMAP (read the online tips on how to do this). This is only temporary, Gmail is way better online. Once Outlook has synced with your Gmail account, you can simply move your messages into whichever Gmail “folder” (Outlook sees labels as folders) you wish, using the Outlook “Move” command. This is fairly quick, and has the added advantage of retaining the original From: and To: information, rather than forwarding the mail to yourself.

Thanks for this useful post! I just finished cleaning up my inbox and it already feels like I am on the stairway to Inbox Heaven. :)

Just a tip regarding multiple signatures for Opera users (the Firefox crowd already has the plugin): you can create notes (Ctrl Alt E, or open the panel) and insert them into any form by right-clicking and selecting the note from Insert note.

have a look at http://gmailnotifier.net

There’s nothing quite like a chocolate Hobnob ;-)

OMG, I think I may love you! Thanks to Joanna Young for stumbling this post. I had just opened a gmail account last week and now is it possible that you have unlocked the mystery that I have sought for so long? Have you cured the clutter that chokes my productivity? I have taken the challenge and will dutifully report back. Thank you for putting it all in one place. The grammy goes to……

Very gratefully, Karen Swim (at gmail of course!)

hello. Nick, or anyone, gmail is having issue connecting with hotmail to transfer my inbox. Any suggestions as to why? (I apologize if it was mentioned in the plethora of comments to this post, I am not able to read through them right now…)

thanks.

I’m glad you’ve found a system that works for you Nick. Speaking from the perspective of someone who gets quite a bit of email, I just want to flag one thing to be wary of:

Dealing with email as soon as it comes in works only if you don’t get a lot of email. If you get a lot of email, I’ve found the system to be unsustainable. If you’re constantly being interrupted by having to deal with email it becomes very difficult to focus on one particular task for long enough to become strongly focused. And while it’s technically possible to resist the temptation of the blue email icon until you’re done, I found it incredibly hard to do so. The only solution that worked for me was to uninstall Gmail notifier and start processing emails once or twice a day.

As you start to get more and more emails I’d be interested to see if you make some changes to the system, but if it works for you at the moment, that’s great. I’m just flagging something to watch out for.

That’s a good email solution. Already use gmail for all personal uses. Only use work mail for work stuff.

I don’t worry much about the gmail hacks, ‘coz I don’t really leave my self logged in. I have GTalk which notifies me of new email and allows to check it there but otherwise, the browser is logged out.

Back to the topic, Nick, good workflow.

Should help cut down on email time for a lot of people. :)

Thanks for the great response all! Here goes:

@Barry: My apologies! I wasn’t aware of Outlook’s “sent on behalf of” quirk. The problem appears to be with Microsoft’s incorrect handling of mail headers as a pose to Gmail. There are two workarounds I can think of:

a) Use Gmail under your own business domain. Info here: Gmail for business
b) Sign up for another Gmail account using your business domain as the username. For example, if you send email from a business account at “test.com”, you could sign up for a gmail account called “test” or “test.com”. You can then use that as your primary account, and set it up to check personal gmail accounts. It’s not ideal, but it’s a quick workaround that will reduce the effect of having your gmail username appear in business email.

Personally it doesn’t bother me — I’ve been sending email via gmail from my business domain to Outlook users for over a year. None of them have mentioned it to me, and I’ve not lost any business! I’ll update the article to link to this comment – thanks for mentioning it.

@Shannon & James — It’s a good question Shannon, and a great tip James. Thanks for adding it.

@Jason — thanks for the Outlook migration tip. That’s sure to help some folks out. Lifehacker has a tip about checking Hotmail accounts from Gmail using the Notifier that berry linked to. You can also look into Hotmail forwarding.

Are you sure your University doesn’t also support POP? It’s unusual for IMAP setups not to include it. I would recommend asking them if you haven’t already.

@Bas — Thanks for the Opera tip. I’m a big Opera fan.

@Joshua — Yay! Another hobnob fan. :)

@Karen — Thanks for stopping by! Look forward to hearing how you get on.

@libby — It seems Gmail won’t connect to Hotmail directly just yet. You might consider using one of the Hotmail forwarding services available. I’ll add a note to the article to this effect.

@Skellie — Thanks very much for the warning! I probably get about 200 emails a day right now. I don’t check them all as they come in religiously, but my notifier count rarely gets above 20 before I process it. I dread to think — how many are you receiving these days?

@The Cubicle Guy — Thanks for the kind words. GTalk sounds like a good alternative to Notifier. Does it have a shortcut to compose an email in your browser? This is the killer feature for me for any webtop-to-desktop email bridging app. I recommend staying logged into Gmail and just password-protecting your computer — it saves so much time.

–
Yikes! I’m off to put the kettle on. Keep your thoughts and feedback coming all.

@Nick – The problem for me is that I have one regular gmail account, and three GAFYD accounts (two business, one personal). My solution is to use good old Apple Mail, and have each account set up to use the correct SMTP log in. I have it replicated on my iPhone too.

I’m gonna go get some Hobnobs to help me think through the best solution :-)

@Barry: Yes! Turn to Hobnobs — it rarely fails! In all honesty, it’s a tricky problem that would require Google’s help to address. There’s a lengthy discussion here detailing what Google could do to solve the problem, intermixed with some heated debate about whose fault it is in the first place.

I will look into it some more but, I’m afraid to say, if having your Gmail address appear in the sender bar of your clients’ Outlook applications is a no-no for you, you might be better off taking a deep breath, sticking with your Mail iPhone setup, and taking solace in a nice box of hobnobs until the problem is remedied.

It certainly makes more sense than using Gmail to receive all your email and then having to trip over to your GAFYD accounts to send it. I’ll report back if I find a better solution.

thanks for this – great tips. would love to hear more on your labels ideology. i have recently started living out of my gmail account (after using various clients on windows and mac, like you) – actually, i’m using mailplane at the moment, but feeling pretty ambivalent about that. anyway, if you’ve the time, i’d love to hear more about how you use labels, and why that way. thanks!

@m_s — You’re welcome! Here are my thoughts about labels:

The concept of labels (or tags) is great. Being able to quickly tag email with relevant keywords can help you dig those emails up later. But there are two big problems with the way most people use these tags.

1) The main problem comes when you’ve been labelling email for a while. What happens is that you end up with hundreds (even thousands) of keywords that encompass an incredibly broad range of subjects. This makes it very hard to scan and apply tags.

2) You have to be very disciplined and have a good memory to use tags effectively. Once you have 50 or so tags, you need to remember that you’re tagging all money-related emails with “finance” and not “money” or “cash” or “dosh” or anything else. It’s very easy to end up creating additional tags to label things you’ve forgotten you already had a tag for! You end up with duplicate labels that often describe the same category.

My simple hyphen system attempts to get around these problems. By using labels like these: PTO-guestpost, PTO-book, PTO-adsales, I can quickly scan a list and apply a label when it’s absolutely necessary.

It maps very logically — you simply think, “OK. Which area does this email belong to? Oh – it’s about Put Things Off. Great, now which ’subfolder’ should it fall into? Oh – it’s an ad sale. I’ll label it PTO-adsales so I can tot them all up when I do my monthly PTO books.”

I’m simply taking the power of tags and applying a folder-like principle. It eliminates some of the problems I’ve talked about above and adds order to what would otherwise be a long list of indecipherable keywords.

Of course, Gmail lets you add these tags automatically based on subject or email content using “filters”, so you can automate much of the process and your Inbox becomes virtually self-filing.

Hope that helps — let me know if it’s gobbledygook!

thanks, that’s a generous response. let’s see – i have about 18 live labels: maybe that’s not too bad. i read somewhere (can’t remember where, wish i could!) someone saying that he only labelled items that still required a response, and then he removed his labels and archived. i use one big documents folder and have everything in that tagged (with finder metadata), and it works brilliantly, thanks to os x’s spotlight and other programs like filespot and leap. but just dumpin’ all my mail into an archive with no way of finding exactly this message when i need it? a step too far for me. of course, it’s not no way – not at all – i have that considerable google-fu at my beck and call. but maybe i don’t trust myself enough to remember who something came from, and then labels are a pretty cool way of finding every message related to this or that project. or maybe i’ve missed something?

I have to disagree with the “delete as much as possible” idea. This may be beneficial if you are approaching anywhere near the space limitations, but I’ve been using Gmail for over a year and have only recently reached the “1% of total space” limit. I’ve had several times in the past (using other email hosts) where I deleted an email I thought I wouldn’t ever need again, but then, well, needed it later on. I agree with deleting junk — like stupid emails from coworkers with pictures of kitties or clever “workplace jokes”– though.

Also, I like to use filters- what’s the point of saving emails (or even having email correspondence at all) if you can’t find them again? I use basic folder categories (”Family”, “Work:[insert job name]“, “University Listservs”, etc.) and apply filters whenever I get a new unlabeled message, either by using the sender’s email address or keywords as the basis for sorting. If you don’t label and file your emails, then of course this step won’t save you any time — but if you do, then I have found that this is the most efficient way for me to do it.

@Mary — Google actually promoted Gmail on the basis of never needing to delete an email again when it first launched. Archiving everything works OK, but if you get a lot of email, you’ll fill your allocated space faster than you think. You’ll also experience other side-effects, like searches taking longer.

Filters are great too, but I know people who get a little obsessive over them. I find the Gmail search functionality so good that I’ve not needed to label most emails. I can still find everything within seconds.

As always, use what works for you! My advice is just a starting point.

@Mary – I delete only spam and crap, but archive every business related email. Its great to be able to look up a discussion from over a year ago. I also send a quick email summary after phone conversations. Having everything documented in gmail helps avoid misunderstandings down the road.

My account has tens of thousands of emails and I’m only at 44% usage. Unless you get a ton of huge attachments, the 6 Gigs goes a loooong way.

@Nick – Wooohooo. I finally found Hobnobs at our local World Market store. But they were sold out of the chocolate ones. So close…. :-(

Something I’d add. I like to use IwantSandy.com for reminders of those tasks, etc that I would definitely forget to do. I know about when (two weeks, one month, next year…) I need to address it again. Then I can archive the email (that once was a task) until I get the reminder and I can resurrect the task.

OK…so there is one thing I haven’t seen addressed…attachments. I receive loads of attachments. Some of them are summarily rejected by Gmail, being bounced back to the sender. Very bad form. This is what keeps me tied to our corporate email client…Lotus Notes (shudder). Any ideas?

What if somebody tried to attach chocolate Hobnobs and they were bounced?

I have implemented all of your tips and for the first time in well ever, I am enjoying the sanity of an empty inbox. I have also picked up some great tips from all the comments here.
@Adam, thanks for the Iwantsandy.com tip! I was using Toodledo but it has its missing pieces. I think Sandy with the Inbox Heaven method may set me off on a new level of productivity.

Nick, when you wrote this I bet you didn’t count on spawning a whole new community of people. You may need a discussion forum for this topic! Thanks again for the helpful tips!

Karen

Just goes to show how many people use Gmail and how many *should* be using Gmail!

Nick,

I have been using Gmail as my primary port for incoming and outgoing email addresses for quite some time now. However, I had never really considered the archiving feature and its advantages with organizing starred items as to-dos. Excellent advice! Thanks!

I adhere to the empty inbox philosophy myself, but I found that from a productivity point of view, there was nothing worse than having Google Notifier installed. Once you know something’s waiting for you it’s hard to resist the urge to go and have a look and disrupt your train of thought. I schedule 2-3 email clearing sessions per day and avoid using it at other times unless I need to send a message.

This is the bitchenest set of tips ever! Okay, maybe not ever. But it’s still super handy. I was doing about 98% of this before, but thanks for pushing the other 2% home. (Did you see that fast math?)

Thanks for the tips, Nick, and long live shortcuts!

@Nick, GTalk sits in your system tray and pops up a little box in the bottom notifying of any new emails. Then in a few seconds the box fades out. If you’re on the computer, you can see it. If not, it will go away but change the system icon to show an M. When you click on the client, in the bottom row, it shows an M (The envelope with the red M for google) and a number next to it which shows how many emails. If you click on this, it will open the browser and log you in and show you the email. At this point you’ll be logged in. Otherwise you’ll be logged out.

The cool thing is that the client is logged in but not in the browser and hence the browser isn’t saving cookies marking you logged in. Although, it’s not all that big a deal. Who really stores their personal banking info in their gmail anyway, right?

Good article. However, it’s not made clear as to *why* Gmail is a requirement to a desktop email app or why Gmail in inherently more productive than a desktop app.

Rule 1) Delete as much as you can. If in doubt, delete it.
Rule 2) If it needs action within two weeks, star (label, color,
categorize) and archive it.
Rule 3) Archive anything else that you’ll need after two weeks.
Rule 4) Twice a day, take action on all your starred items.
Rule 5) Delete, archive, or star-and-archive every email as it comes in.

All of these can be accomplished with most any email app really. It’s not so much the app as it is the process. Plus, what good is an app that can’t access your email that is unfortunately trapped in an Exchange account? Perhaps I’m wrong but Gmail doesn’t play with Exchange does it? Does Gmail has a rule system? I have an elaborate set of rules that will automatically create tasks out of emails, set categories and redirect certain emails to certain people. It really saves me time and a lot of manual processing and reading.

Perhaps I’ve missed something. Could someone could summarize why webmail is inherently more productive than the email app?

@Sterling: Woohoo! Now to find the chocolate ones. (They’re worth it).

@Adam: Good tip. I’ve dabbled with Sandy too. I’m planning to do a review of online assistants in future.

@Mike: The only time Gmail should reject attachments is:
a) If the attachment is over 10MB (in which case, tell your senders to use a service such as dropsend.com or mailbigfile.com)
b) If the attachment is an .exe file. Gmail rejects all Windows executable files, even if they’re zipped up. This is a security feature. No-one you know should be forwarding .exe files anyway.

If Gmail is rejecting any other attachments, its a problem — I’d recommend you get in touch with Gmail support about it.

@Karen: Hooray! Glad it helped. Perhaps one day there will be an Inbox Heaven category within a PTO forum! No plans just yet though…

@Joel: Yep, you still have to be fairly disciplined, but Notifier is a must in my opinion. If you’re really struggling to stop it from distracting you, I recommend people turn off audio and pop-up notifications in the preferences. Personally I leave these on, but it’s an individual thing.

@Charlie: Thanks. Glad there was something you could gleam from it all!

@TCG: I don’t use instant messaging clients much, but that sure sounds neat. I’d be worried for people in offices about security issues, though, but I guess GTalk is no different from Notifier in that respect.

@Chris: Some good questions! Let me see if I can help.

1) Does Gmail work with MS Exchange accounts?
If your Exchange server supports POP, GMail should be able to check it in the way I’ve described above (Info here).

2) Does Gmail have a rule system?
Yes. It calls them “filters”. Info here.

——

You also noted that I didn’t mention why you should use webmail exclusively. Good point! Here’s an addition that should explain my position.

Why use webmail instead of desktop mail?
In my experiments with various mail clients and webmail offerings, webmail always felt more productive over desktop mail. I think the reasons are numerous:

a) It separates your email from your desktop work. This is a personal thing but, for me, removing email from my day-to-day work on the desktop creates a much better working environment. Having that tiny barrier of loading up a web page rather than flicking to a mail application prevents me from reading or sending mail unless I really need to.

b) It works the same wherever you are. It doesn’t matter if you’re in an office or an internet café, or if you’re checking email on your phone. You don’t need to learn several interfaces or let your remote working hinder your productivity. It looks and feels the same everywhere.

c) You don’t need to store mail locally. You would be surprised how much disk space some mail applications take up. When I deleted Entourage and its database, I freed almost 2GB from my hard drive. Yes, disk space is as cheap as chips these days, but why use that space when you don’t have to?

d) You don’t ever have to migrate. Once you’ve switched to Gmail, you never need to archive or transfer your mail ever again. If you only upgrade your kit once every few years, or reformat your machine occasionally, this might not be such a big deal. But it’s a massive bonus if you run a small company with several machines and multiple users.

e) It updates itself. Webmail enjoys all the advantages of most web-based apps. There are no maintenance or upgrade issues. You don’t have to install security updates or worry about plugin-integration when new versions come out. It all happens quietly in the background, without wasting your time or energy.

Why is Gmail’s webmail better than most?

a) The Starring system is built-in from day one. Yes, other webmail has the ability to flag email, but it doesn’t allow quick access to all flagged items in the same way that Gmail does. And yes, you can create a folder of “active” email that requires your action, but it’s not fully integrated into the setup in the same way that Gmail’s is, with its “star” and “archive” buttons.

b) Starring an email simply creates an alias. When you star a mail in Gmail, all you’re doing is creating a shortcut to that mail. When you click on “starred” mail, you’re just showing a list of all those shortcuts. You don’t have to actively file email into folders and complex hierarchies. Gmail just uses stars and labels as aliases instead. There are only two folders powering it all — “inbox” and “archive”. It’s simple and it works.

c) Other Gmail advantages The list could run on and bore your socks off! Attachments integrate with Google Documents perfectly, the spam filtering is excellent, the virus scanning is quick and powerful… Before I sound even more like an advert, I’ll leave it there!

So yes, while you can implement my 5 rules on any email system, and substitute starring and archiving for other more complex methods, my experience suggests that it simply won’t work as well as if you exclusively use Gmail’s webmail setup.

Hope that helped and wasn’t too wordy for a Saturday!

@Chris

You beat me to it! I’m also pretty bemused by this. I couldn’t see anything mentioned that I couldn’t do using a desktop application?

Personally I think it’s a little risky using Web-based email all the time due to the dependence on an internet connection. What happens when your broadband goes down, or (perhaps less likely) the Gmail system crashes? With webmail you don’t have that copy (a backup!) on your computer, allowing you access to old emails whatever…

And my other issue is the time it takes to log in. Once I’ve fired up my Mac in the morning, I literally just click on the mail icon and within 30 seconds all new email is waiting for me to read. Webmail has never seemed that easy – but perhaps I’m just being cynical ;-)

@Joshua: I must have just replied to Chris before you posted!

Re: connectivity. If your broadband goes down that often, switch to another provider! If you’ve got information in email that’s so important it needs to be backed up (like attachments) you should probably be saving those emails as txt files and storing attachments locally.

Re: speed. When you stay logged in it’s only a little bit slower to bring up a Gmail window than it is to bring up a mail app window. I find the difference is enough to put me off reading email unnecessarily, but not enough to inconvenience me otherwise.

@Nick

I know – I was WAY too slow with that one ;-)

When I was talking about a connection going down, I wasn’t meaning I struggle with that problem very often. In fact I’m pretty lucky – haven’t had a glitch for about 3 months. But as for saving txt files and important attachments? Gosh – that would seriously cripple my productivity. I was on the phone the other day to a client who wanted me to look at a .doc file he’d sent through about a month previous, and in barely 10 seconds I’d searched, found, and opened the relevant attachment. I just don’t think you can do that with Webmail.

And as for logging in, I just think it’s such a nuisance. I know some people like to have that barrier (as you mentioned) but for me I just close my mail program when I want a break.

Obviously it’s all very ambiguous, and everyone’s got there own way of working that works for them. I just prefer to keep things close to home ;-)

Yup! There is no universal ‘right way’. It’s whatever way works for you. :)

Great post – I use Gmail pretty much exactly how it’s described here and it works wonderfully (managing 5 accounts). I automatically label mail from each account so it’s easy to sort through, as well as using a label for “To-Do”, and then coloring those messages using the new color label feature so they stand out, serving as a reminder to get ‘em done.

Gmail can also be used as an effective place to store and transfer files. I wrote a post about that (4 Problems and 5 Solutions for Using Gmail as Online Storage http://tinyurl.com/2pftum) if anyone’s interested.

Long live Gmail. :)

Basically what I do except I use Gmail’s IMAP now to check my mail in Thunderbird on computers I have in my house, and the webmail Gmail for all else. I don’t care about it being on my mobile.

This is a fantastic article which I’ve just followed and will hopefully save me a vast amount of time.

I tried to link my Gmail account to my companies Exchange webmail system but keep on getting error messages :(

I guess the only trouble this leaves now is getting calendars setup correctly. I’ve always wanted to sync my work and pirate calendar but found it almost impossible! Anyone got any ideas?

Nice ideas in principle, but I really see how this is any different than say, IMAP Thunderbird Nostalgy. All you’re really doing is cutting out the distractions and keeping your keyboard shortcuts handy, no?

Loving Gmail as well and you didn’t mention one great way to enhance it, using Greasemonkey scripts:

Gmail HTML Signatures
http://blankcanvasweb.com/gmail2_html_sigs/
Custom HTML signatures for each email account in Gmail

Google Account Multi-Login
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/16341
Allows you to switch between multiple google accounts using a drop down

Also, there is a really sweet Firefox extension for RememberTheMilk which puts the RTM to-do list in a column along the right-hand side of your inbox. The sweet part is you can create tasks from email by using tags. And there are some other cool features as well, like putting RTM events in Gcal:
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/gmail/

Finally, there is another Greasmonkey script which puts Google Calendar in the bottom of your Gmail window. Just click on the Calender link at the top left to toggle it on/off:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/19956

By trial and error, I live with this setup too. And I’ve had complete peace of mind. Plus, as far as I know, GMail is the only email app (web or desktop) that has the conversations feature. That makes it so easy to check what you were saying fifteen minutes ago. The normal email apps only attach the ‘Quoted Text’ below your message.

Gmail is the ultimate email app! :)

Did anyone get this to work with a hotmail account? I tried the suggestion about going to my hotmail account and setting up forwarding. But I got the following error from hotmail: “You’re only able to forward mail to a custom domain or an e-mail address that ends in hotmail.com, msn.com, or live.com. Please try again.”
So in other words, they don’t want you to forward to gmail!!!!
This is a bummer since for a brief moment, I thought I could consolidate my 2 gmail accounts and my 2 hotmail accounts all into one place :(
I guess I’ll just stick with Outlook which can read all of them.

“Just because Google’s logo looks like it was designed by a committee of clowns, it doesn’t make it evil. Its motto is “don’t be evil”, for goodness sake!”

That’s pretty naive, IMHO. Google is no less “good” nor “evil” than Microsoft or Apple or Yahoo (don’t you think “good” and “evil” are pretty irrelevant words to use when describing a corporate entity?). If you think Google provide Gmail out of the goodness of their hearts then I believe you’re dead wrong: your email and personal data (note I don’t say “private”, because you gave privacy up the moment you handed that data over) is a treasure trove for them. Don’t try and convince people that Gmail is anything other than another way for another corporation to make money (remember, that’s what the shareholders want).

Personally, I host my email myself, and use sup (http://sup.rubyforge.org/ – conversations, archiving, labelling, starring, FAST full text searching, etc., at the console/over SSH) to read it, and greylisting (http://www.greylisting.org/) for spam filtering. Works like a charm for my 20,000 mail messages, and I feel a LOT better about the privacy of my data than I would if Google had their hands on it. I realise this is out of some people’s league, but I’m just illustrating a relatively secure alternative.

Oh yeah, and my inbox is always empty.

google might not be evil but they do hold a lot of info about you. see http://www.blogboing.com/index.php/2007/12/14/google-gonna-find-out-whos-been-naughty-or-nice/

@Nick — check with your company if they support access via POP (and ask them to turn it on if they don’t). Gmail uses POP to check accounts.

@Anschaung — Thunderbird’s a nice app. I’d recommend anyone who doesn’t see the advantages of webmail just to give my setup a shot for a week. You can always switch back.

@Timothy — you’re right! Gmail’s conversation feature is a winner. There are several mail apps that offer something similar. Apple’s own Mail.app lets you view threaded conversations by changing an option in the preferences, for example. Gmail handles it better though!

@Debbie — use IzyMail to forward your hotmail.

@aw — of course Google are making money off it! So they should be. They’re probably hosting millions of accounts. I have no issue with someone making money off something they’re giving away for free. I ran my own mail server for over a year, so I’ve got experience from that angle too.

@aw & bboing — you’re absolutely right to be wary of your privacy. It’s a personal choice, and you’re right to guard it. For me, the convenience Gmail offers far outweighs any ads they serve. And I feel my data’s safer with them than all of the alternative offerings.

Good discussion on how to integrate various e-mail accounts into Google. I have recently started doing similar, but the techniques here go farther.

Recently posted about integrate more than just email. To really make everything convenient, e-mail, IM, calendar, etc. would ideally be integrated for access just like the gmail access described here.

Any suggestions on how to take this to the next level?

@Stephen: Your post about general integration is a good one! My take? I think this is a process that will occur naturally over time. The web is gradually heading this way, anyway — with the abundance of APIs, initiatives like OpenID and great plugins such as Sxipper, it’s only a matter of time before the level of convergence you’re looking for is here.

But right now, I’m afraid it’s just a case of waiting it out!

Since over a year you do not need an invite for gmail to sign up. Just sign up (http://mail.google.com/mail/signup).

While doing so, also sign up for Google Apps and you won’t need an Exchange mailserver either!

Ronald

Thanks Ronald! I had no idea — I’ll update the links accordingly.

I wish there was some way by which greasemonkey would work on other browsers. Because, I’m hooked on Safari. :)

@ Brian – Those looked good in theory, but a couple of the comment threads are full of others saying, “This doesn’t work…” The multiple login isn’t secure, either. Not a big deal for me, but for some people, it could be.

They work just fine for me over the last few weeks :)

Really, the best one to have is the RTM extension. Really changed my life. If you have it, you can set it up so that when you star an email it automatically put its in your to-do list. Then you can really have a clean inbox and you don’t need to go back and keep checking your starred items to see which ones you feel like doing today.

@Timothy Andrew – Have a look at GreaseKit :-)

Hi, just found this post through Lifehacker three hours ago and now have a TOTALLY EMPTY in-box and all four accounts pointing to my main one. Thank you.

My question: I installed Notifer but it says “Cannot log in to server, the server’s certificate is invalid”.

Any ideas?

Thanks for popping over and trying it out, Tess. Regarding “invalid certificates”, have you checked to see if your system date and time is set correctly? Info here: Invalid Certificate Error

If that doesn’t do the trick, shout up and I’ll have another think.

@Barry – Thank you so much! This is the first time I’ve heard of GreaseKIt….amazing! :)

This system works really well now that Google Notifier is working. Sadly my work email address is controlled by someone else (my employer) and until I work for myself (which this site is hopefully going to help me do) I can’t merge ALL my accounts as the Outlook server is behind a very secretive firewall. :(

But on a brighter note, I was sat next to someone at work the other day who had, and I am not exaggerating, over 2,000 unread emails. Y to the Ikes!

@Nick Miners – I used to use a rule in Outlook to forward all of my work emails to a GMail account, that was set up to send as if from my work address. You get the ’sent on behalf of’ problem I mentioned in an earlier comment, but if you can live with that it should be fine.

I used to work with someone whose email management strategy was to let them build up until he had about 500 or so in his inbox and then delete them all. He claimed that in a year the only issue it caused him was turning up to one meeting that had been cancelled!

I feel better using fastmail.fm (paid) services.
Webmail interface is quite similar, imap support is much better and faster for me, i can use my own domain name without facing a gmail lacking the cool features (like it’s the case for google apps for domains), and most importantly I like to be able to fine-tune my antispam system, which is not possible in gmail (especially whitelisting).

I also have a gmail account which of course is great mainly because is free.

Thanks Barry – I’ll give that a go.

While this has obviously had thought in to it – it is not a solution for many people. There are endless problems with this in many areas. It’s great that it works well for you, however the assumption you make, particularly in tone – is condescending and ridiculous – and basically makes the whole ‘article’ less enticing.

It doesn’t account for work accounts – with sensitive data that would violate NDA and other policies were you to forward.

It doesn’t account for mobile users traveling outside of cell areas that can compose while in transit, planes, trains, etc – and send en masse when arriving.

It doesn’t account for those who simply don’t wish to have all their mail archived for live via google’s servers, or who wish to anonymize responses.

Finally – why bother deleting when in doubt with so much storage space, what difference does it make if you are labeling sparingly and using search to find things anyway.

There are some great tips in here for basic email – but on a whole, it certainly is not inbox heaven.

There are thousands of email setups. This is just one. I’m not selling it as the only solution, so use whatever suits you. :)

This idea appeals to me, and I would be delighted to process all email through one portal.

I use Outlook for personal email and Thunderbird for work. I store all email locally because I also use these applications as kind of an all-purpose database where I collect all sorts of information, not just email.

I need offline access to these mail stores. Can Gmail be archived locally? Can the mail stored on the Google servers be encrypted?

Other Chris — local archiving is reportedly in the works. When it arrives, it will be made available using Google Gears.

Gmail encryption is available via a Greasemonkey script, but it’s something I’d like to see integrated natively too.

It’s important to note that Gmail is technically still in beta, so expect lots of improvements like these to be rolled out over time.

Am I crazy, or does the mobile version of gmail still *not* allow you to apply labels to messages? I just downloaded the latest version for Blackberry (1.5.1.1090). Aren’t labels one of gmail’s flagship features?

Nice article — I was surprised to learn (through experimentation) that Google could read my old AOL address despite AOL claiming to only support IMAP.

That said, this system is pretty deeply flawed for someone who travels a lot. The time on airplanes is invaluable for catching up on email. Without any access in the air the system really breaks down.

I suppose I could also have my mail app sync with my gmail account, create a local version of everything, work offline while flying, sync back up when I land… but then I may as well just always use the desktop app instead of the gmail webapp.

Really, I don’t see why doing email in an app versus a webpage matters — and to be honest, I find gmail a bit slow to respond compared to the snappiness to a desktop app like Mac’s Mail.

@peter: ‘Fraid so — it’s the only feature missing so far. I think we can expect it to be added in future updates. For me, Gmail mobile is still the most feature-rich mobile email client I’ve used.

@Peter: Good to hear AOL works. Local offline access seems to be a big issue for several. As I’ve mentioned, it will be available in time via Gears; I know this will be make-and-break for many. Re: speed issues. I’m not sure what connection others are using, but on a 4MB cable setup it’s pretty zippy for me.

Hotmail does now offer a forwarding service, under option > settings.

It is a similar process to gmail whereby you have to verify the address at the other end…

Does your set-up retrieve spam messages on the original account. Cause I was trying to see if it does but could not confirm it. I’ve tried doign this but the deleting and sorting out messages takes a bit of the time cause I check everyone of them Please could you check on this for me? The reason for this is sometimes some of my important mail goes to the spam folder.

My company uses server-based Outlook. This is great info and definitely would be a nirvana setup if I could get it to work. I set up a “Redirect” rule so that all my Outlook email is sent to Gmail and the original sender is kept intact. So that works great if someone specifically sends ME an email. However, if they send it to multiple people including me, Gmail doesn’t have the rest of the recipients. In other words, I can’t do “reply to all”. Does anyone know how to configure Outlook for this?

I absolutely love Gmail, but it’s useless. What will happen when someone steals my password? (keylogger or some other method) In case that happens I want to be able to pick up the phone and resolve the issue within minutes and get my mail back from backup. I would be willing to pay for that service. That’s why I still use my Internet provider’s webmail, I can call the helpdesk.

There is one problem I have encountered that maybe someone can suggest a way of dealing with. If I receive an email containing a virus, gmail leaves it on my server and just delivers a notification email with subject like “Message left on server…”. Well, what is a good way to get all those virus emails deleted from the server?

ok, I went through the whole ordeal today and have encountered one little problem. I receive all of my voicemails in my email. This worked great in mail.app because they played within the mail program, however on gmail they do not, instead they download and open in itunes which is somewhat of a messy hassle.

Any suggestions?

@Shaun – According to this page, Gmail has a built in flash player that lets you play the voicemails right in Gmail. I’ve never tried this though. Maybe you just have to install Flash Player? Or try it on Firefox?

Pl disregard above post. That Google help page was for Google Talk, not Gmail. Apologies.

@Darren: Hotmail will not forward to Gmail. You get the following error when you try it: “You’re only able to forward mail to a custom domain or an email address that ends in hotmail.com, msn.com or live.com. Please try again”

isymail will forward hotmail to gmail however it costs $1.49 / month.
GetMail will forward hotmail to gmail however in order to get it you have to use TrialPay and sign up to buy something from one of the advertisers.

I have not found a free way to forward hotmail to gmail. :(

I have been using a system very similar to this for some time now and I love it. Starring the todo items is a nice refinement. I also installed Google Desktop, which gives me a local archive of all my Gmail and provides access to all my old Outlook mail without ever having to open Outlook again. I try not to go overboard with labels and most of mine are applied automatically using filters, depending on either the mail account they were sent to or certain special senders.

@Debbie – Hotmail seems to be forwarding ALL my mail, to my gmail account just fine…

Your system really solved (nearly) all of my problems. Managing multible email accounts on multible operating systems really was sort of painful until now.
The only flaw for me is that google won’t accept executables to be sent or received. But luckily, Thunderbird can take care of that.
By the way, Thunderbird also supports starring, so you can use it nearly as proficiently with google mail as using the online interface.

I put a picture up to show how my Hotmail to Gmail is working…
take a look here: http://img206.imageshack.us/my.php?image=hotmailtv8.gif

This is great – the feeling of an empty inbox IS heavenly! Only one problem I have encountered tho – since i started doing this this afternoon, my Gmail has “stopped responding” and I have had Firefox shut down at LEAST 20 times, every time while working on going through the old transferred emails. Sometimes mentions a script is busy. I have shut down all other programs just in case (digsby was recently updated also so wanted to make sure that wasn’t somehow taxing the system) and it still happens. Wondering if it has to do with it checking my yahoo mail and transferring ALL of those over somehow, or in the labeled, archiving etc? Doesn’t make any sense to me and I skimmed through all the other comments and didn’t see mention of it with anyone else, but any thoughts? My notebook is not SUPER fast but I don’t have any problems running anything else I try to do and several apps at same time, and never once in a blue moon stop responding… ANy ideas? I hope I can figure it out cuz this seems like a great system :)

@ Stacy – had the same thing happen suddenly a couple of months back around the time that Gmail upgraded its versions. I blamed Gmail. But when my partner’s Gmail reverted to normal after a few days, I blamed Canadian Gmail. Well, that wasn’t it, so I blamed Firefox. Hm, no luck on IE either. It was my computer. End of story. Had to blame something!

I was ready to go for a full reformat (I do that sometimes, keeps it nice and clean) when I thought, “Hm. Maybe I’ll just remove those Firefox add-ons.” Better, but not quite. “Hm. Maybe I’ll reinstall Firefox overtop my current Firefox.” Nope, not it.

Hm. Maybe I’ll fully uninstall Firefox and reinstall. Fresh Firefox, no add-ons or plugins, a nice defrag and some archiving of old files, and not only did my Gmail work like a charm, but my computer ran better, too.

Back up your bookmarks and password profile before you try this, though.

This set-up currently has one flaw for me. Some of the messages I receive goes to spam and the mail fetcher does not forward it. You have to go back and check the spam folder from time to time.

@koyut – Out of force of habit, I never delete spam without reading each one’s subject line.

I have just started using this and I love it. My only complaint is that gmail does not check my email accounts every 10 minutes as stated. In fact, I can look on my gmail account and find that it checked my other email addresses as much as 43 minutes ago. How do I change that? It interferes with my ability to check my email on my Blackberry. The email from the Blackberry internet service comes much faster. (I am using both as I transition).

I don’t think anyone mentioned the issue about attaching big files to emails… I have at times to send out files around 5 to 7MB and gmail takes forever to upload to the server and get the email sent. I have had to leave it running for a good half an hour to get an email with attachment to send….

I have been a big fan of Gmail for a long long time and canceled my other email clients long ago, but recently with all the issues with sending out big attachments, I have resurrected my Mail app!!! Well, not entirely.

What I have done is disable it from checking mail automatically. So I don’t receive any mail there. Instead, whenever I have a large file to send, I just drag the file to the mail app icon, it opens a new email and I hit send. It leaves fast and reliably. I have it set to send from my gmail account so if I ever need to re-send the file again it is in my sent items on gmail! I think it’s a handy solution….

@anonimouse I have been using Gmail exclusively since this post and so far I have had no problems. But long ago I started sending large files through http://www.driveway.com or yousendit.com. While I typically did not have problems sending large files, recipients often did. By using driveway yousendit the recipient gets a link which allows them to download directly from the server. I hope this helps! So far the Inbox Heaven system is working like a charm for me!

Karen

I have not heard back from anyone regarding my issue with gmail only checking for new emails once every hour. I spend most of my day reading email on my blackberry and if I am cooresponding with someone, I want to be able to have a “conversation” without having to wait an hour between emails. If I’m at a desktop, I can ask Gmail to go fetch the emails but when I am on the Blackberry, I cannot figure out how to do this. I have even tried to go to gmail.com on the blackberry but it doesn’t have the option to check for emails. Does anyone else have this problem?? I find I am resorting to using the original Blackberry Internet service since the emails arrive in that inbox almost immediately.

@Lynn — People are reporting a wide range of checking intervals. If you desperately need to reply to new email very quickly, my recommendation would be to set up your other accounts to forward all incoming mail to your Gmail account, rather than getting Gmail to check them at seemingly staggered intervals. This should result in near-instantaneous delivery of new mail as and when it arrives.

There is also Google2Go!, which is a program for windows mobile phones. Works really well. Its kind of like pocket explorer but with all the tools google has to offer.

In general, I agree with most of your points in this post. Actually I was doin most of what u said except for the starred “to-do list” concept.(I use this now by the way)

The part i don’t agree with is the labels. I actually have a fairly complicated way of dealing with it. I have 9 “categories” like “.7.Social Network”. Then I have a bunch of minor labels that are more specific like Verizon, Online.Accounts, or Grand.Central.

When an email comes in, its filtered to 1-3 minor labels and 1 category label. It makes for easy search and browsing. When I’m away from the internet for an extended period of time, lets say a week, I come back to my inbox with most 15 messages and everything else nicely organized and archived.

Now to help out lynn, what i do about email that i need to reply to asap is forward the email directly to gmail and set a filter to send a text message to my phone. Since i have verizon, i use the vtext service that is available.

I also am having a “slow” checking issue with my accounts that have been set up in gmail. I even deleted them from my blackberry but i think I might have to go back to the blackberry for “instant” mail. I cant wait long for emails.

I do like this set up though. Great work…

Nick, thanks, this really has helped me out quite a bit. leaving mail.app was a hard choice, but i feel liberated. thank you for spelling out the whole process in plain english (with some humor peppered in).

the only flaw i see in this entire system is that you can’t set up the time intervals at which gmail checks your other accounts, so you can either:

1. just sit and wait till gmail feels like checking your other accounts

or

2. click over to the accounts page and manually refresh it yourself

definitely not a deal breaker, but something i hope would get rectified in the future. that’s the one feature i regret leaving, all my accounts were checked once every 2 minutes. call me obsessive, but i like to know when things come in :)

@SUGE & Adam: Don’t forget that there are two other options (not mentioned in my article) to use Gmail to check all your mail:

1) Forward your mail from your other accounts.
2) Email everyone in your address book to tell them you’ll be using your Gmail account from now on!

Both are great alternatives to having Gmail check all your mail, especially if you require instant delivery for some reason.

Well, even after my earlier post pointing out the ’sent on behalf of’ quirk relating to Outlook, I’ve returned to using GMail through a browser rather than Apple Mail.

The one thing that inspired me to make the move back was the Remember The Milk add on for Firefox. Thanks to Brian for pointing that one out!

Thanks for the update, Barry — glad it’s working for you. I’ve stopped using RTM but, I must confess, when Brian linked to the plugin, I was mightily impressed at the idea!

Nick,
Thanks for the info but I have two questions.

1. When I “do” set up the forwarding of hot mail and yahoo will the email that comes to my gmail in box say who its from or just my yahoo or hotmail email address?

2. Will this “speed” up gmail checking mail? This is a BIG must for me…I need to know stuff yesterday…..

Thx again…

Hi Suge. I’ve just tried it with Yahoo, and the answer is yes and yes: sender and subject are displayed, and Yahoo forwarded the mail instantaneously. Note that only some Hotmail and Yahoo accounts seem to have the option to forward mail, but if you’ve got it, it sounds like it would be better for you.

Hope that helps.

Nick,
No luck here on either of my yahoo emails and hotmail….No forwarding :(

Suge — a few options:

1. You can use a service like Izymail (free to forward text-based mail forever, but costs after the first 30 emails if you want to receive html email too).

2. You can simply tell your contacts to use your gmail address and switch over any newsletters/automated mail you receive.

3. You can just live with receiving email to Gmail’s schedule — there are few situations I can think of where I’d absolutely need to receive mail more than once an hour!

Thx Nick,
Gonna played arround with it some more…Quick question. On my mobile gmail on my phone i am having a contacts issue with some “groups” not showing…Say a group for family or jokes…They are on my pc but not mobile…Any ideas??

Sorry Suge — not sure about that one. Try Google support?

My hotmail account is one of the ones that won’t forward :( However I managed to find a copy of GetMail4.0 that can be dowloaded from Softpedia at http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/E-mail/Mail-Utilities/GetMail2.shtml
I installed it and it seems to work. I’m still trying to evaluated how well, but it certainly does forward my hotmail messages to gmail! Note: I originally tried to download GetMail from e-eeasy.com (which I’m assuming is the official site) but was unable to get it without going thru the TrialPay thing. Personally I’d rather pay for software than be forced to get a “free trial” of something I don’t want.

By far the best inbox management article I’ve readed so far! I forward all my blackberry mail through Gmail due to their superior spam protection. Keep it up Nick!

I love this. Not just the concept, but your clear write-up of it as well. But what am I missing:

Rule 2) If it needs action within two weeks, star and archive it.

Okay, but what if it needs action, say, three weeks from now?

Thanks AC. There are a couple of ways I recommend noting items that require action after a fortnight:

1) Make a note of the subject line in your diary on the date it requires action.
2) Label the email with the date it requires action.

In reality, the vast majority of email needs deleting or archiving straight away. The rest normally requires action within a couple of days. Only a very small amount needs action after a fortnight.

Nick,

I just started putting this into action. I already had a GMail account, but I have well over 3000 archived messages in there, including stupid things like google analytic reports, and even advertisements from companies. I went ahead and created a brand new GMail account, and now I have a clean slate to work with. Then I setup my few email addresses (2 actually, one for my site, and one for work) and it seems to be working very well.

Thanks for the idea, I don’t think I would have come up with something like this on my own.

Thanks for the article, it’s a great find! I’ve been itching to switch from MSN for a long long time, but there are several things that have been bothering me. What if I have more than five accounts? I have six and I can tell you right now I will have the hardest time ever trying to decide which one to drop.

And what do you suggest for notifying all my friends – people on my contact list, and people not on there. As well as updating websites. I’ve registered for years with my current e-mail address and updating it at the numerous places could take ages.

@Brian: No problem! Glad it’s working for you.

@Phil: Good questions. Here are some answers:

Q: What if I have more than five accounts?
A: If there are none you can get rid of, simply forward your mail from one of the accounts (using mail forwarding from your webmail account settings), and let Gmail check the other 5.

Q: What do you suggest for notifying all my friends – people on my contact list and people not on there – as well as updating websites?
A: I suggest that you just let the process occur naturally over time. You’ll still be getting all the mail from your other accounts in Gmail; simply reply to all mail using your Gmail address. Add a footnote saying “myname@gmail.com” is my new address. Please update your records.” and leave the rest to time.

Likewise, I’d just leave your old email address on your various websites and then update them as you edit each page or add new ones. You’ll still be receiving mail from those old address anyway. Updating them seems like a waste of time to me.

Finally, if you really want to tell your contacts directly, there are services out there (like Plaxo) that can help.

Thanks

Hey! My company does support the whole Pop concept, so I set up a rule to forward all my email to Gmail…only it’s not working. It looks like Outlook is not running the rule the way it’s supposed to. I set up the rule to apply to ALL incoming email and have it forwarded to sandielaw@gmail.com. What did I do wrong? I love Gmail and really really want to use it to help manage my massive email load from work… Thanks!

Well, Nick. I flunked the gmail move. I think it has something to do with my painfully slow Internet connection and my addiction to “instant emails”. Anyway, I still have a gmail email account, but I’ve gone back to Entourage. I have, however, developed a penchant for an empty inbox, so I’ve been slashing and deleting like never before.

I figure the gmail account will come in handy for those folks who don’t deserve my “real” email address. :)

Keep up the great work! (I just wish you posted more often!)

Warmly,

Lis

@Sandie — I’d check with whoever manages your network that they allow email forwarding. Some companies are a bit funny about this sort of thing.

@Lisbeth — Well done for trying. As you’ve found, your network speed will have a big effect on the success of any applications you use in the browser, including email. Keeping an empty inbox is half the battle won, though. Keep it up!

Re: posting more. I’ve got some other posts in the pipeline. I’d love to do this full time, but enjoy working on my other projects too. Maybe one day!

Sometimes things that seem so complex, can be so simple. I followed your path to inbox heaven to the letter. Now I am so enveloped in inbox heaven, that I believe I’ve heard angels singing and felt the puff of a fluffy cloud against my cheek. Meanwhile, my inbox is empty and my starred to-do list patiently waits for my attention. You are a genius. And I am happy.

Now, please write an article on how to organize my desk. I’ve been drawing big yellow stars on everything, and my marker is running out of steam. Help!

Hi Nick !

Nice post! However, I achieve practically everything (except the mobility, which I don’t need at present) with Apple Mail and MailTags / Mail Act-On.

Have a look at that system for people, who prefer to have their e-mail on their computer, e.g.
Sitting in a hotel without Internet and need access to info in your e-mail ?)
Sitting on a train / plane and want to work on your e-mail?

I am afraid I can come up with quite a few scenarios, where Gmail might spell ‘disaster’. :-)

Cheers !

George

Dear Nick,
I found you through a post on Stopforwarding.us (via DailyCandy). When I upgraded to a new Mac on OSX I had to forego Outlook and switched to Mail which works pretty well except for one feature that had been a huge timesaver which now I sorely miss: I could pre-select a folder where my email would be moved into autommatically after being sent.

How does gmail handle sent emails? I file all emails for work into a related job folder. Then I archive the entire job folder upon completion of the project.

Which leads me to my next question. Is there a way to archive folders with the whole set of emails (meaning a local copy I can burn to a CD and then remove from my email app? When I was on Outlook using OS 9.2.1, I used a neat shareware program called Outlook Express Archive which would automatically archive the whole folder and create both a rich media and text version copy of each email.

Due to the kind of work I’m in I sometimes need the full email with all the formatting, not just the text. Secondly, to create an individual pdf of each and every email on a project would be incredibly time-consuming and non-productive.

For now, I think I will start off by seeing if I have success forwarding my hotmail emails to a gmail account. Right now I am using that email address as junk mail filter and for subscriptions I receive from sites: listservs, newsletters, ads I want to receive (i.e. from sites I like to shop at), and political action notifications. The idea is to reduce spam to my “important” accounts (business and personal emails) by using one address for all my website registrations and anything else where my email can be exposed to public use (or abuse!)

Despite being aggressive in setting up subfolders for organization and rules for automatic sorting of emails, I find the sheer volume of email quite laborious which makes Inbox heaven quite attractive.

I will try the slow migration starting with my junk mail filter (no tears if there is a screw up on that account) and if I can resolve the archiving and sent mail issues, then I will think about incorporating my business and personal accounts.

Thanks for sharing with all of us. I’ve been curious for some time about the perks of Google Mail.

@Kathy — a desktop heaven article is on the cards. Stay tuned!

@George — yup. Mail Act-On is great (I linked to it in this post). Access issues are becoming less of a problem. For £10 a month in the UK, you can have a wireless usb dongle that plugs into your laptop and gives you unlimited net access from anywhere.

@Leslie — How does gmail handle sent emails? Gmail uses “conversations”, a threaded list of your email exchanges under the same email subject. So if you star an email, you’ll have the whole conversation (including your sent mails) available too. Pretty neat.

Is there a way to archive folders with the whole set of emails
Not that I know of. I’d suggest that this type of backup is obsolete anyway — removable media is dead. If you’re worried about losing old email, you could always set up another email account and automatically forward a copy of everything you receive to that account as a backup using Gmail’s filters.

Hey Nick, @Chris, other commenters, and fellow gmail initiates –

Reporting back to say that if I’m not to the pearly gates already, I’m definitely on my way to salvation. I haven’t even finished instituting all 5 rules yet (I am doing the gradual transition method), but just using Gmail alone has sharply increased my productivity and in over a week now I’ve been able to maintain an Inbox at zero.

There’s something about a completely empty Inbox that brings peace of mind I have not felt in a long time. Technology is living up to its ideals by keeping track of all my email for me so my mind doesn’t have to and can concentrate on what’s truly most important! Like hobnobs!

The amount of spam has noticeably reduced, the search for archived messages is incredibly efficient, and yes, checking email is fun again.

Did I mention that gmail even archives your chats? Brilliant!

@m_s, and @AC:
For the person that asked what about events more than two weeks away, or for those who get a huge amount of starred messages (to-dos), I use Labels “Week of May 19-21. When the week is over, I can delete, apply a new label or archive the message. This allows me to see all events for that week at a glance rather than sorting through all the starred messages in my to-do list.

If you’re using Google calendar, this may not be necessary, but for me this has worked out well as an adaptation from my old folder system, which never worked because I never had an empty inbox to then go back and visit those folders.

Also I use labels to organize my messages (sparingly, naturally) like I would a “tag” on del.icio.us, or a blog. I can put more than one label on any given email message (or conversation) which allows me to search by more than one term, allowing me to organize messages in more than one category without taking up the hard space required to copy messages in multiple folders (the old way).

This makes sense mainly for those messages that I may not easily be able to find by a search term, or not remember where I saw it. For example, I have “Deals” for all emails with a coupon. I have “Political – Polar Bears” for all petitions or political actions I may have taken on that subject, so I don’t have to remember which organization I sent it through when entering a search term (in case some of those may not have the word polar bear or I may not remember that I did one on polar bears). Before signing the third petition on saving the polar bears, I can see all my recent actions and decide whether I need to respond or not to this one. This is also great for when I get a letter from a senator two months after the fact, and I am trying to figure out which correspondence she is responding to.

I basically am using the Labels to organize things that are not already handled by the conversations interface or obvious search terms, or unrelated email messages I want to group and view at a glance.

Now allow me to take a moment to sing the praises of the conversation interface. When I signed up I took a moment to take a tour of gmail, which I highly recommend if you are like me and are investing a lot in the switchover.

The fact that every reply to a conversation is organized like a deck of cards rather than chronologically – that alone is reason to use gmail in my mind. I was amazed. It is way faster than any search using a mail application/client and you don’t have to remember how many replies there were, which folders they’re in, or which email to search. I can archive all these away but have them at my fingertips if I ever need to go back.

Also, in the Mail App, my searches didn’t always turn up every message from a person because sometimes it would come up under their name, but what about those that had their email address but didn’t have their name? And what if I didn’t remember that email? They would be missing. This made the search function inadequate and more time-consuming. With Gmail, goodbye lame searches!

Oh and the filters! Every month when I get a notification from a mailing list that I am signed up at such and such an address. Or moderator rules that I’ve seen a million times that are a reminder and are for new list members. Now… I don’t to have to even look at the darn thing. I set it up to immediately apply the label of my choice and skip the Inbox to my archive. I do that action once, and never again. Talk about a time saver! And if I need to periodically delete the old ones, I can access it through the label and delete them – two secs and I’m done!

@koyut, @Debbie and other hotmailers:
Forwarding messages from hotmail was seamless, but I wanted to mention you do need to check your spam and trash box for ones that didn’t make it into the inbox because they will not be forwarded to your gmail. Pretty soon, this will become less necessary though as I identify what is spam and not through the hotmail interface. Every so often though it makes sense to just check in there for anything falling through the cracks (Like the notice that Nick posted a response to my comment here!)

Due to the Outlook issue for business domains, and the inability to archive to a hard disk entire groups of messages at a time, I am keeping my business email separate and arriving locally. (Maybe when local archiving comes out I can reconsider though.)

This is not PC – Inbox Heaven (as in politically correct), but is working out great for me, at least for the time being. Just like you Nick want to have a physical separation from what you’re doing on your desktop and your inbox, I like having a physical separation between business messages and all the personal and non-important crap that I don’t need to check while I’m on a work deadline.

That said, I will eventually have every other email pointed to the Gmail address, and may consider forwarding a copy to Gmail of work messages when I am on a client site.

I added to my gmail account an old email address from before I married that I no longer use but occasionally still receive email to. After adding the email to my account I instantaneously had all the past messages in my google mail box. I had an entire years worth sorted and archived (and a few starred) within 24 hours.

I would not have had the time to go back and take care of these older messages if it had not been for your superior system and the Gmail interface working so well, that I had an empty inbox and the time to do so.

I finally got to see a friend’s honeymoon pictures that he had inadvertently sent to my old address. Hooray!

@Skellle and @Joel Falconer
It is hard to break the habit of continually sorting messages so you don’t feel you’re going to drown in your Inbox later if you don’t check it right now, but this system does make email fun again, and I think that I will eventually relax into this new system and reduce my dependency on the local application and the need to let whatever system I’m using dictate my email usage rather than the other way around.

I am using the “starring” technique to help me archive and better manage the old email client until I am completely integrated into Gmail. Thanks!

In June, when the school year has ended I will add my other personal email that I receive school notices to. I am doing this gradually so I can archive all the messages from my local email application together and not have to remember whether I need to look in my Gmail or my local hard disk to find something. Also, a wedding I am participating in May will have concluded by then and I can have all those emails organized and archived in one spot.

At such point, I hope to have a nice “conversation” with St. Peter.

Thanks again Nick for sharing your system with us. I am so grateful to have found your blog, Putting Things Off. I hope now, thanks to an empty inbox, I will actually be able to do so!

Nick!
It’s nice to see that so many other people seem to seek your advice! And that they seem to top my trivial easy peasy general ‘my computer doesn’t work!’ questions I throw at you!
Also.. I spend far too long on your website, and am extremely impressed even though I don’t understand half of it!
Hope all is well mon frere,
Anna x x x

Aside from hitting the five (5) account limit on the “Receiving email from other accounts” setting and having to do some forwarding mojo with the two overflow accounts, this system worked flawlessly, and I could not be happier.

True to your words, this system has made me fall in love with e-mail again. My productivity has already jumped a bit, and it is a relief to not have e-mail breathing down my neck any more. Plus, the way GMail handles conversation threads, and its ability to handle them even on the busiest mailing list e-mails is fantastic. It has made it much easier for me to read and follow them compared to other e-mail clients I have used.

Thanks for the great guide. I am looking forward to more like it. Be well.

Hi Nick,

Lots of great stuff here. I have a few things to add and a comment.

What you’re suggesting is great for the average email user but there are inherent flaws with Gmail that may or may not outweigh the benefits for some users:

1. There is little if no support. Layered deep in the FAQs is a contact form that, when written to, may or may not prompt a response back from a live person in less than three business days. To a power email user or someone using this for business, this is completely unacceptable. If email is mission critical to a business, you must have support.

I trialed the business version of Google Apps and while they do ultimately provide a phone number (also buried several layers deep), they seem to work only business hours and are unreachable after hours or on weekends. This too is unacceptable to someone relying on this setup for mission-critical business email. There is MUCH room for improvement in Gmail’s support department, commercial version or not.

2. There’s no true way to backup your email from Gmail. In theory, one might say that it’s not really necessary to back it up. Google runs on the data cloud principle, best computers, redundant, blah blah blah. In practice, you’d be wrong to say that. All it’s going to take is one failure or the loss of someone’s data and it will be a huge issue.

I’ve been using Gmail for years in a different way – as a master offsite archive for my POP email accounts. See an article I wrote on it here.

I suppose in theory one could set an alias to map to both the Gmail account and a POP account and do the reverse – use the POP account as the local backup, downloading with Apple Mail once a week or so to desktop.

Now my contribution to the thread…

One of the things not mentioned here in the comments, that I could see at least, is that Gmail has a “Mute” feature. When you subscribe to a discussion list, you can click on any message in the thread and in the dropdown actions there is an option “Mute this conversation”, which will archive future posts to the thread automatically, meaning you won’t have to process them. It’s quite useful.

Cheers,

Adam

@Leslie – Thanks ever so much for popping back to give an update, Leslie. I completely agree with you about the conversations feature — it’s implemented better in Gmail than any other web or desktop app I’ve used.

@Ian Parker – Thrilled that it’s worked and made a difference for you, Ian. I agree that it makes handling mailing list threads a joy; I filter them to skip the inbox completely, then skim and delete them once a week, very much like a regular RSS newsreader.

@Adam – I agree that support and backup is important, Adam. It’s a personal choice but, for me, it just doesn’t matter that much.

Putting aside the fact that I’ve not lost any data or required support since I started using Gmail in May 2004, I can’t envision a situation that I couldn’t recover from. Any problem created by loss of access or data would be easily reversible for me, even if it meant simply asking Miss P to remind me what we said about X and Y at the end of April.

While it’s becoming an increasingly common phrase, I think there’s a lot of danger in using the words “mission” and “critical” so close together; I feel it escalates email to give it a false sense of importance. Are there really businesses that would go bust if they couldn’t access mail for a day? Would CEOs tumble from their thrones if an email provider lost half a dozen messages? Perhaps. But my feeling is that, for the vast majority, it doesn’t affect them in this way or, if it does, the types of emergency scenarios they envision would prove to be manufactured crises at best.

At the end of the week, Gmail is a free service. If people want backups and 24/7/365 support, there are plenty of providers who’d be happy to take their money.

I do appreciate that others may be more dependent upon email than I am, though, and I take your point that backup and support can be important. To me, it’s just not that important. I’ve never been one to worry myself through all the possible nightmare scenarios — life’s too short!

Thanks also for the reminder about muting — a lovely feature. If people have shortcuts switched on, they can simply press “m” to force future replies in that conversation to skip their inbox and become archived instead.

Well, I must say that I agree, but I still find that having a link in my dock/quicklaunch bar is very useful … so I use Prism! Although its still in Alpha (I think), It’s just a stripped-down version of Firefox. You can only get to one site, and there are no add-ons, toolbars or anything.

For me, it acts as a really quick way of getting to my email and not getting distracted by my other tabs.

Isaac

Hi, just thought you’d like to know that I took this good advice a little over a month ago and it has revolutionised my life – for the better, of course.

@IsaacS – Prism does look promising and has a whole host of applications (punn intended).

@Rosemary Nissen-Wade (aka SnakyPoet) – So pleased to hear it! I’m glad to have made a difference. I’ve got a follow-up post based on this one coming up soon — stay tuned!

Love the system. I’ve just set everything up following your steps and for the first time ever I have an empty inbox… and a grasp on what is in my to-do list. Love it.

I’ve been using a plugin called Remember the Milk – which can add things to your todo list as you star them. That might be useful in this sytem too.

I have this set up and it works great!!!

I want to know if there is a way you can set it up to where when you get an email it forwards to contacts or groups in your address book? Thx

@Emma – Glad to hear it’s worked for you! There seem to be a few people using the RTM plugin. Here’s a link for others who want to explore it.

@SUGE WHITE – Yep, you can set up a ‘filter’ to forward incoming mail. Here’s the tutorial.

I tend to agree with a few other comments that having a notifier really destroys flow. Constant interruptions aren’t a good strategy.

I prefer a system to have predefined times to check in. It is much more productive for processing email quickly and for the rest of your productivity.

Just my opinion.

I tried the forward to groups but it only lets you send it to “one” email address at a time…..Any ideas?

@SUGE WHITE – Looks like you’d have to set up a forwarding address under a domain that you own, then add the group names to that account. I can’t see a way of doing it directly in Gmail.

Maybe this is old news –

I just came across this post and tried to give it a go in my Gmail. I discovered that by using the RememberTheMilk plugin for Firefox, as soon as I star a message it gets added to my tasks list in the sidebar.

After you’ve starred and archived your messages which require action just move your cursor over the task in the list. Click the little Gmail envelope icon and you will be taken right to the message related to that task. When you take care of what needs to be done, unstar the conversation and it will automatically be removed from your task list. Beautiful!

What are your thoughts on using Mailplane (for Mac) to do what you’re describing here? It’s a web-like interface in a desktop app (adding the functionality of drag-and-drop and iLife integration).

@Seth: Mailplane’s great — it covers the gap between browser and desktop app. I’m a big fan of Fluid for the Mac too.

Great, thanks for the suggestion on Fluid! Looks like a very interesting app. … One other question: Have you used GTDInbox, a Firefox extension for Gmail? Or have you found a way to integrate GTD some other way into your Gmail habits? I’m just curious to hear about extending Inbox Heaven to GTD. Thanks!

@Seth – I don’t use GTD anymore, but you can use the Remember The Milk Gmail extension, like Brian, Barry and Chris above.

@Joey –

It doesn’t happen all that often. Once a week, or even once a month, go to your online mailbox, “toggle all” the offending mail left on the server and delete. That’s what I do. Gmail has already told you which ones they are, if you’re in any doubt.

Hi Nick.

Great post. Really echos the system I currently have in place. I’m even using the RTM extension, although I need to be a bit more vigilant with that.

My issue/question with the system is this: Even though I don’t have a smartphone, I am in the market, and am disappointed that I don’t think that I will be able to send mail “From” all of my incoming addresses using my mobile phone, either using Outlook Mobile, or the Mobile Gmail client. Only the default google account.

Also, have you run into any issues because of Gmail’s “on behalf of” quirk? (Let me know if you have no idea what I’m talking about.)

To me, this is a key feature. Your thoughts?

Hi Nick -
I’ve been following this post for a couple of months now. Have been fetching all my POP3 accounts into Gmail which is brilliant. I still check my Blackberry with the Blackberry server, however. Do you have any opinion on fetching email from your POP3 accounts vs. forwarding email from your POP3 to Gmail? Is one better than the other? Will one get to Gmail faster than the other?

@Mau – I used to use mine simply to filter mail (and reduce the load later), and rarely sent mail directly from the Gmail mobile app, so it never bothered me. I can understand your frustration at not being able to send from multiple accounts by phone, though. Perhaps it’s a feature we’ll see added in the future?

Since writing this post I’ve stopped using mobile email altogether. It was proving so distracting for me (and annoying for others) that I’ve kicked the habit for good!

In regards to the “sent on behalf of” issue, see the comment I made above here.

@Lynn – Thanks for all your wonderful contributions to the discussion, Lynn!

Forwarding is faster than POP checking in this case. I recommend people use forwarding for all personal accounts that they’re never likely to log into directly again, and use POP for the ones that they require isolated or group access to, for example, a sales or general enquiries address.

@Nick: Thanks for the reply. Do you mind sharing why you stopped using GTD? I’m curious to hear your take. … Along those lines, I liked your screencast on Things.app. Do you still use that application — only not for GTD per se?

@Seth – My thoughts on GTD are veering off the topic of this post, but I’ll indulge the question briefly:

I still believe that GTD teaches good basic habits, and that it can prove valuable for a narrow band of very busy people. However, my opinion is that it encourages obsessive compulsive habits — tweaks, hacks and general ’system twitchery’ — in all but the most determined, and these things are usually bad for productivity and personal happiness.

I still use Things, but only for managing client project to-dos. Everything else goes on paper.

If you need any more info feel free to email me. I’d like to keep these comments on topic if we can.

Hi Nick,

just a note on the ’send mail as’ function and the presence of my gmail address in what are meant to be work emails. Sometimes when sending replies my clients decide to be helpful by not sending their reply to the work email address and instead send it straight to the gmail address. This means that I do not recommend using the ‘reply to same address this message was sent to’ option. The bulk of my email is work related so I prefer not to be caught out when a client responds to the gmail account. Ultimately you have the choice at the time of sending so I prefer to err on the side of caution.

Regards

Jud

now this is a nice way to organise all my email.

but, since about the whole world has an account on gmail, about all logical combinations to my name are already taken…….

any tricks for that?

@Ton,
I had the same problem and what worked with me was to just spend some time thinking of some creative combinations..think what you have to do for a license plate. Try more than one word. It doesn’t have to be your name, but could be a nickname or just something that fits the idea of email. I ultimately chose sendyourmuse.

I did a similar thing a while ago having seen the Inbox Zero Google Tech Talk lecture (I think it was) and haven’t returned since. I have a different take on labels but most is the same. Archive, archive, archive and keep the inbox at zero. It’s great.

Love it & implemented it!

However, I am only able to receive email from my AOL accounts, not my Yahoo accounts. Yahoo’s annual fee to allow the POP service is $20. I tried the fix. IzyMail’s monthly fee is $1.49 = $17.88 annually (to retrieve more than 30 emails). And then I’m still not 100% certain Yahoo would allow it. So, the “fix” doesn’t seem to be a fix at all. Any other ideas?

I did hear that someone using yahoo.ca did not have these same issues.

@Christy – Most people I’ve spoken to about this have paid the $19.99 for Yahoo Plus to forward old Yahoo mail to their Gmail account, and then gradually phased out the use of their Yahoo mail before the 2nd year. It’s not perfect, but I hope it helps!

Great system – my only problem is that my work account is on an MS Exchange server and there is no IMAP, POP, or web access – I can only get it at work!! I know – stupid!! So I have to log in at work (which sucks because I don’t work regularly at a computer) and drag over my work stuff to my Gmail account (setup in Outlook via IMAP) – I am still looking for some way I can get to this mail without being at a computer at work) – I’ve already tried forwarding, but I still have to login and download the mail from the Exchange server before it will process any rules – arggh!!

Nice tips, though – and I bought and enjoy “Todoodlist” – great stuff. You and Leo are now my favorite non-productivists!

Max

Thanks Max. I’m not certain, but you may be able to forward mail from the MS Exchange server directly to your Gmail account. Here’s an article that looks like it shows how to do just that: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/281926

Check with your company before you start forwarding office mail to personal accounts, though; some of them can be a little sensitive about these things…

I didn’t read all the post yet and thus I am not sure if anybody mentioned it before.

The best and easiest way to migrate mail archives is to use the appropriate tool. One that knows about different protocols and archive formats: your mail-client.

You have:
- a bunch of already downloaded mails via POP3 sitting in your favorite mail-clients belly
- an IMAP account full of mails

You do:
- connect via IMAP to your Gmail account
- drag-and-drop your “old” mails to your Gmail account within your mail-client software!
- sit back and relax

I haven’t tested it with all mail-clients out there.
But I assume that Outlook knows its own archive format ;-) and can talk to IMAP (you need to be able to connect through your network though). And so does Mail.app, Thunderbird, .

Why do you remove Google critical posts?

Dear Tim

I have neither removed any comments on this post, nor have I ever sought to scrub clean the many critical comments in my other posts, even though one or two are rather offensive personal attacks.

If you’ve posted something that never appeared here, the chances are that it contained more than 2 links — such posts are automatically removed by the spam system that filters all comments before they reach the blog, and aim to reduce both spam and excessive self-promotion. I don’t review these personally because I wouldn’t have time to do anything else, so I’m afraid any post you’ve made with multiple links, profanities, or TXT SPK will also have been automatically filtered. My apologies for any inconvenience this causes.

If you’d like to repost your comment, you’re very welcome to. I have no hard-fought loyalty for Google, nor any affiliation with them, so you’re welcome to write whatever you please. While I’m sure that readers of this blog are a smart crowd capable of making their own decisions about trust issues/downtime/service levels etc, I welcome any comments from those whose personal experience may cause concern or raise interesting points of consideration.

Finally, I’d appreciate it if you use a real email address instead of a fake one if you’d like to continue to take part in the discussions on Put Things Off. In traditional journalism, editors are bound by law to hold the name and contact details for any publicly-submitted letters/comments they print, even if they are asked to list them as ‘anonymous’ when they go to press. It is standard practice not to publish comments whose sources cannot be traced, lest there is a need to contact them later for legal or follow-up reasons. While I don’t currently adhere to this rule, it’s something I’m considering adding to the comment filters in future. Your contact details are never shared, sold or published, and I think it a simple sign of respect to back up any comments with an active email address.

Thanks for your contributions so far, and I hope you can see that I have neither a hidden agenda, nor a desire to stoop to such shoddy editorial practices as personally removing comments, be they critical or swimming with praise.

@Nick Cernis – Well, I wrote a comprehensive comment before and backed my thoughts with references to–actually cited–three major (granted, you could argue here) news sites, all different ones.

As for your spam filter, you should consider white-/black-listing or simply add a big red box warning not to submit more than 2 links…

After posting my comment I could see my post and a little message saying “awaiting moderation…” A bit later it was gone. That is why I accussed you deleting that post. I clearly understand now that you had no bad intention and I want to apologize for that. Feel free to delete my comment, really! ;-)

I see your point with the email address. I hope your future plans don’t involve forcing everybody to sign up here for commenting…

wow, great article! Now I’ll love gmail even more! I already use it for several addresses, but my question is (and sorry if you already answered this), if I don’t assign a label to an email, where does it go when I archive it? I always assumed it had to be labeled to use “archive.” And then do I find it again if I need to by just searching for it?

@Gidget – All mail – with or without labels – goes into the All Mail section. The best way to get to it is the search feature though, once you have a few thousand emails in the archive, it gets pretty impossible to use the all mail section, but it is very useful to get back something that you accidentally archived.

The only thing I object to is the necessity of using a webmail client. I have a very similar setup using Apple mail that allows for flagging, archiving and aggregating mail accounts (I have 3). You can also aggregate news feeds in Mail, if you are so inclined, and with IMAP, you have access to everything on your iPhone.

And Google won’t read my mail (tin hats on).

So here’s a question, can one email address (ie our family email address) be forwarded to/fetched by 2 gmail addresses (ie mine & my husband’s personal email addresses)?

I tried setting this up, but it doesn’t seem to be fetching all the mail from our family one (some emails have arrived to mail.app where I normally check the family address (which is also gmail) but have not arrived to my gmail account on the web.

Thanks for any help on this!

@Chris — sure, you can use a desktop client with a similar setup to some degree, but there are still several advantages of keeping everything in the browser, especially if you travel a lot or access your mail from different devices.

Now that Google is providing offline access in its mobile e-mail client, there are even less reasons to stay rooted to desktop apps. Of course, it is a personal preference, and I have absolutely no objection to people using their own system. I’d simply encourage everyone to try both options before they settle on one.

@Gidget — there are several ways you can forward e-mail to multiple accounts, but it very much depends on what service you currently use. The quickest way to forward a single e-mail address to multiple accounts (assuming at least one is a Gmail address) would work like this:

1) Forward the existing account to your first Gmail address.
2) Set up a filter in that account which forwards all mail from the original address to your second account, while leaving the mail in the inbox.

For example, if I have an address called test@test.com which I’d like to forward to two addresses called tom@gmail.com and jane@some-other-address.com, I would forward mail from the test account to Tom’s Gmail account. Then I would set up a filter in Tom’s account to forward all mail it receives from test@test.com to Jane’s inbox, while keeping that mail in Tom’s inbox for him to read.

To set up a filter in Gmail, you’ll find instructions here: http://tinyurl.com/4embwm

Hope that makes sense and proves to be a simple enough option.

This is a very interesting article. I set up my gmail account but I am very nervous about letting go of Outlook. I may need professional help.

Also, what do you do about gmail notifier when two people share a computer and both have gmail??

@Christine – Breaking free of Outlook is worth it in the end, honest!

If you’re sharing a computer with someone, I’d recommend you set up separate user accounts that you can each log in to. As well as giving you your own space to work in and customise, it also means you can each have your own version of Gmail notifier running without worrying about privacy or interruptions.

How you set up multiple user accounts depends on which operating system you’re using, but it’s usually pretty easy; a Google search for “multiple user accounts Mac” or “multiple user accounts Vista” turns up a few guides.

I was starting to get into this until I realized the Gmail mobile app won’t work on Windows Mobile. Is it fairly headache-free to use the Web-based mail on a mobile?

@Christine – Have you tried Gmail on Windows Mobile? Google suggests that it might work if you install Java: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=52870

Nick, Thanks for your help. That google page said the info I requested could not be found. What I did find out is that Java has to be installed by the manufacturer and consumers cannot download it and my phone does not have it.

A heads up that the hotmail solution you suggested only includes 30 rich-text messages and a 20-day free trial. after that, it’s 1.49 a month according to the izymail web site.

@Nick Cernis –
Hi Nick,
Great post! I too am very close, but I have labelitits, because I really want my archive to be organized. Is there another way to do this?
What I do now is after actioning an item I file it, with a label and then archive it. At the end of the year I label everything something like 2007 and therefore have an empty “cabinet” for the next year. Once I am in 2009 I just delete everything in 2007.

I feel I need this cabinet system, to keep track of archived travel plans, purchases, reciepts, wedding planning and warranty info for reference. Without the labels there is no quick way to look up my emails if I can’t think of the right search term.

I would welcome any suggestions.

Also I don’t have a mobile that works with gmail, but I do have the ipod touch. I currently sync it with IMAP, but then I don’t get access to my cabinet. any ideas?

Very much enjoyed the column and beginning to institute the steps. However, I have been in the habit of using starring for other purposes and am somewhat reluctant to switch its use to creating a to-do list.

I’m wondering how folks may have used the other “to-do” options that are available via Gmail.

For eg, Create a “to-do” label and then send an email (for eg, from your cell phone or from your Gmail account itself) to your Gmail account with “+to-do” inserted between your login and the “@gmail.com” part will result in the email automatically being labelled “to-do”. You can then setup a filter to catch these emails and have them skip your inbox, etc. I added a “todo” to my contacts lists, that is associated with an email address that contains the “+todo” component so that I can easily send a to-do item to myself.

Another possibility is the new facility for Tasks recently added via GMail Labs. If it’s enabled, you can manually add to your task list, have a particular email added to the task list via “more actions”, etc.

Another possibility is the RTM module. I use the alternate version (to the Firefox extension) as I’m a long-time user of Opera and have had better success with GMail Lab utilities than with Firefox plug-ins. In any case, the RTM module (either version) is a very accessible task list (so I don’t need to go my starred items) and I have setup a contact called “RTM” in my GMail contacts to take advantage of the fact that each RTM user has an unique email address that they can easily send new to-do items to.

TIA,
Brad Madill

@Brad: There are a couple of options besides the ones you’ve described (which are perfectly good solutions, but are perhaps a little complex in comparison):

1) Turn on ’superstars’ in the Gmail lab (settings>labs). This gives you the option to star mail in different colours. A red star could represent a to-do item, whilst you could keep your gold stars for whatever you were using them as before.

2) Use Gmail’s new built-in to-do list called “tasks”. This can also be switched on in the labs menu (settings>lab).

@Tanveer: I’d suggest getting more friendly with the Gmail search options, which are pretty powerful once you start using operators (info here).

For example, to find all messages received before 2008, you just type “before:2008/01/01″ (without the quotes) into the Gmail search box.

There’s no harm in labelling things, but by becoming more familiar with Gmail’s search capabilities, you’ll find you start to label less and less.

Nick,
I have been using your system for a while now. Its great! What would you suggest to someone who has multiple gmail accounts as far as getting mail from those accounts? The gmail check speed is not instant. Should the just be forwarded to the main gmail account? Thx

@Suge: Thanks for checking back in with an update. Glad it’s been helpful for you.

Yes — I’ve started forwarding all my old mail accounts instead of getting Gmail to check them. It means near-instant delivery instead of the slightly varied checking times Gmail offers.

It’s not always possible to forward mail (as some webmail clients don’t have the option), and some business network admins prevent/forbid it, hence my suggestion that the default be to ask Gmail to fetch mail, but go ahead and change everything to forward if you’re happy with the setup. It’s working great for me.

Thanks Nick. What do you suggest I do with the forwarded accounts? Should I apply say a label/filter “forwarded email” and go from there? What sucks is I think I cant automatically respond with the forwarded accounts. I am speaking of the accts/settings/send from email acct that was mail was received from. Let me know. Happy new year BTW..

@Suge: For the accounts you want to forward, I’d just set a filter to forward all incoming mail and then archive it. In your main account, you should be able to set up the other accounts under “send mail as” in settings>accounts. That way you can hit reply and then select “When receiving a message: Reply from the same address to which the message was sent”. That way you can just hit reply and you’ll be sending the mail as if it’s coming from the forwarded account.

Hi, I just wanted to share one thing with you all.
After reading Nick’s post I just listened to the wise points and did as I was told. I got used to Gmail after a while and was happy with it.
But being a Mac-user for about 10 years now, something inside was still telling me “go back to Mail.app… it’s greener on our side, you are missssssing usssss, aren’t you?” and since Nick wrote that it’s his personal point of view an so on I decided to give Mail another try today.
I found all the important infor about setting an IMAP account with Gmail in Mail.app and followed the simple steps.
Once everything was in order I tried to get mail from the server. Mail started fetching the data…
I was quite surprised to see that it went quite smoothly and already sang a little song under my breath “… you see Nick – it’s not true, you can have Gmail and Mail together…”
But then I got an email with photos – about 5 of them, 2.5 MB each. And Mail started to fetch those attachements… and after waiting 15 min. for them I thought sth. was wrong with the e-mail. I logged into my Gmail account in Safari, opened the message, saw the photos almost imediately. Checked back on Mail, which was still fetching the photos… and sadly I gave up.
You were right Nick, you were right.
:)
There’s one Inbox to rule them all :D

Great list!

The only thing I don’t agree with is DELETING EMAILS.

I try never delete email. EVER. It might sound packrat-ish, but memory is cheap, and time is the only thing that cannot be recovered.

With Email’s gigs of free storage online, there’s no real reason to delete.

Well, I just deleted the notification of that comment! (I don’t delete much any more, but there are things it’s really not necessary to keep.)

The trouble with Gmail is that you cannot sort by sender, subject or size. I want to use email the way *I* want to, not the way some geek at Google tells me I *should* be using it. Is that too much to ask for from an email application?!

@Marathe
True, but you still can make a quick search with a sender’s name and subject and there you go. With filters you can even be more specific.
Gmail does not work like an usual desktop app. There’s a paradigm shift you have to go through in order to use Gmail to its full potential.
For *me* it was worth it.
One just cannot always stick to what one got used to long before.
Cheers!

@Marathe — you’re right, sorting is missing from Gmail at the moment.

I can’t think of a time I’ve ever needed it, though. Sorting by sender is obsolete for me: if I need to find a message from someone in particular, I’ll search for their name. Sorting by subject is a similar story, and I can’t see why anyone would want to sort by attachment size. Perhaps that’s why Google have neglected to include the feature.

@Marcin & Nick:

When you look at a directory (for example) do you ever “browse” the lists or do you *always* search?

I often browse, especially when I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for.

Searching is great when you know exactly what you’re looking for, and Hotmail and Yahoo let you search too.

But sorting by sender/subject and then browsing the result is needed when you don’t know the exact spelling of the sender or the subject for example. How about 2 foreign contacts with similar names. Easier just to sort by name than trying to accurately type in their names in the search box. :-)

@Marathe: That’s a good use case, but in that situation I’d just click the “Contacts” link in the left column. Gmail maintains a list of everyone you’ve ever emailed in alphabetical order, and it’s easy enough to scan through it and find a name you’re not confident about spelling, then select that name and hit “recent conversations” to pull up emails you’ve exchanged.

For me, this seems a lot faster than sorting every single message I’ve ever archived by sender, then scrolling through page-upon-page of messages to get to a sender whose name began with “N”.

Gmail also offers some advanced search operators which makes it easy to search for messages sent in a certain month if you know, for example, that you had a conversation with someone 3 months ago but you can’t remember their name.

Thanks, this is great! I’d thought about moving from Yahoo to Gmail before, but not done any thing about it. I only have 2 email addresses, but always forget to check one of them. Fab, now with Gmail it’s also there & I can reply from it too.

Thanks, Anita! Glad you found it useful.

@Nick: OK, I concede on the Gmail sorting issue! ;-p LOL

Well I just saw the neatest little app that lets you access your Gmail withOUT opening a browser. And I immediately remembered this hot little thread and had to share! Though I’m sure all the Gmail enthusiasts will find this to be old news maybe it will encourage us “desktop” addicts to reconsider email heaven ;)

Check out
GMDeask at http://www.robertnyman.com/gmdesk/

Cheers :)

PS: You can buy various types of HobNobs at the Real Canadian Superstore. In case there are any Canucks reading this thread.

Just sayin’

Thanks for sharing, Karri — it looks neat. Mailplane is a similar idea that’s also worth a look for Mac users, albeit with out the Google Calendar support…

Hooray for HobNobs!

In an article in the New York times, a few features for Gmail available through Google Labs:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/technology/personaltech/26pogue.html?ex=1251781200&en=f077a5a951ba1249&ei=5087&WT.mc_id=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-0304-L20

“GMAIL LABS Gmail is already the world’s best free Web-based e-mail service, with terrific organization tools and a superb spam blocker. But if you click Settings and then Labs, you find a huge list of on/off switches for cool enhancements.

There’s Text Message in Chat (send text messages to your friends’ cellphones from within Google Chat or Gmail); Offline Mail (work on Gmail when you’re not online); Canned Responses (build a menu of stock answers to your mail); Multiple Inboxes (manages mail by auto-creating multiple mail folders); and the delightful Send & Archive (one click sends your reply and removes the original from the list).

Here, too, is Mail Goggles, which is intended to avert the kind of personal disaster that can result when you send mail while drunk. During periods that you specify (for example, weekend nights from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.), this feature prevents you from sending mail until you’ve answered five mental math problems in 60 seconds. (But those Google geniuses can probably do it even after a few pitchers of margaritas.)”

I’m very sensitive to interfaces. Call me superficial, but to me aestetics are important for me to adapt something. Just tried logging in to my never used Gmail and my conclusions were:

1.
Whoa! That is damn ugly as hell. Hello 1994. Did Jakob Nielsen design this? Looks like my Excite mail from pre the millenium.

2.
It IS fast – I’ll give you that. Very fast aqnd effective.

3.
Da Dealbreaker – Sponsored Links all over the right side of the screen. For a seriously focus challenged guy like me (clinically ADD) that just does not work. Not working for my strong aversions towards stupid add content.

So, no Gmail for me.

And apart from that dare I ask throw these questions into the air…

1.
Could we agree that this whole Inbox Empty thing is becoming a dogma? An inbox is just a inbox. It is nice to have it empty, but… Yeah… Whatever… It is not like David Allen is Moses. Neither is Merlin Mann.

2.
I need some more elaboration on why Gmail is sooo essential? Why can’t I just flag and archive my emails in OS X Mail?

@Oliver:

You can change the look and feel of Gmail. It’s Settings -> Themes. There are some pretty good, and VERY functional themes there. I use Shiny because it looks good but doesn’t get in the way.

And if you don’t like the ads, get AdBlock (Plus) and use that. But they really aren’t intrustive, especially if you have a widescreen, in which case they just structure the page. At least it’s not a flashing multi-colour load of cr*p that kills your eyes.

Archiving does work much better in Gmail I find. And you can get it from anywhere, which is useful if you work from lots of computers.

Isaac

PS. I agree with the thing about keeping your inbox empty. I like to be able to see recent emails and use them as a prioritised to-do list. Inbox = to-do, Starred = urgent!

Thanks for the words, I did not know about the themes. They’re much needed, so good they’re there;-)

I still don’t like the ads though. Like having an uninvited person in my living room. Feels wrong.

Your approach to the inbox I totally agree with. Starred = urgent;-)

Nick…Are you married? I set up IH about two weeks ago and have been using it ever since. I’m utterly amazed at how much less stressful my email life is. If you’re not married, then I might as well get down on one knee and propose because…. you’re my new favorite person. I bought the Todoodlist E-Book just to say thanks (and I read it and now I’m using that too! AGH WILL IT EVER END? ;) ).

TC!

I just moved to Gmail – just in time, too, as my computer failed to boot the next day.

About creating a local email archive – here’s what I’ve done, after getting Gmail collecting all my email:
1) Set up local email client to check Gmail with IMAP. This just displays whatever emails are on the server at Gmail at the time.
2) Highlight the new emails that I’ve labelled as important in some way, and copy them to a ‘local folder’ of the email program.

Now that Google labs introduced offline capabilities recently, it makes Inbox Heaven even more juicy! Google even lets you put a shortcut on the Dock.

@Oliver — While there are ways to remove the ads, most of them break Google’s Terms and Conditions.

The only way you can ‘legally’ get rid of them is by signing up for a Google Premier business account at $50 a year: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/details.html You get some other features thrown in for the fee, but my feeling is that most would rather put up with the text ads; they’re not half as bad as some of the other free webmail services out there.

@Amphitrite — Ha! That’s something I’ve been putting off for a while too. Really pleased that Gmail is working so well for you.

@Hilary — Local backups can be great in a pinch. Thanks for sharing

@Garrek — I agree. The offline storage now works on the iPhone too, which makes the web client all the more appealing.

Well, don’t think Google is just your friend:

http://www.slightlyshadyseo.com/index.php/googles-user-data-empire/

We people need to be a little more cautious with giving Google all kinds of info about every part of out lives!

Maybe I’m running away with my paranoia of corporate America which does include Google. I actually found this article looking for a way out of gmail that is still really cool. I agree with Oliver AdSense scares me.

Even if it is only a computer reading my email it still collects data and crunches the efficiency of the different ads creating a more knowledgeable machine capable of interpreting my every desire, further reducing our roles as mere consumers … and so on goes the paranoid rant.

My alternative is GMX a subsidiary of United Internet, it is currently ad free, has all the same features as gmail minus IM and is a good next step.

Just before hooking up with Inbox.com (so far, so good!), I actually wanted to get Gmail – right up to the point where I was informed that “for legal reasons” (whatever is hiding behind that euphemism), my account name was going to be google.mail instead of gmail. What was left for me to say was, Thanks! but No, Thanks! I guess that’s one way of losing potential customers!
Just by the by, Chocolate Hobnobs rule!!! (Though I prefer them with a glass of milk or a Cappuccino!) If you can’t get ‘em, try “Ritornelli”. Excuse me now, if you will – my snack is waiting…

wes

GMX is “a good next step”? Are you serious? I’ve had it with them – just loading your mail or deleting one often takes long enough for a couple of Chocolate Hobnobs to travel down my gullet followed by a Cappuccino just to keep them company!

Nick,

Thnx for this great article. I’m not using it right now, but I will try it tomorrow!

I’ve criticized Gmail here before. But I must admit for some weird reason, this email setup you are proposing really works! My inbox is empty.

This ’system’ really works. Never ‘lose’ a message again in the overwhelming number of mails coming in each day.

Nick,

I started implementing a similar setup a few years ago when I read Merlin Mann’s “Inbox Zero” article but it didn’t really work the way I wanted it to at the time so I gave up and continued using Mail.app.

However, yesterday I spent a good majority of the day getting your version set up and I must say, it’s working wonderfully. I really like having all of my email in one place, labeled and starred.

I also use the “multiple inbox” option found in “labs”‘ for keeping track of current things I want to keep close at hand. (I’ve been using that feature for a while now.) It works very well with the Inbox Heaven setup.

And the best part is having it all in ONE place plus being able to get it to on my mobile without having to login to a bunch of places or switch apps.

Thanks!

~Annie