I’m now taking a longer term view with simplifying the things in my life, however I’m becoming increasingly aware of how quickly time goes – its probably the countdown timer on my desktop!
I realise that life is too short to check 5 in boxes daily (read that as 4-5 times daily) and I have much better things to do, so I’ve finally organised my hotmail.
Organising Hotmail:
- I use hotmail as an email, I know its probably old fashioned, and I’m aware that gmail is excellent, however I’ve had my main hotmail address for years and I would be sad to see it go. The trouble is I have 3 other hotmail email addresses and until recently I didn’t realise you can link them all with windows live. I knew you could redirect mail to the main account but I didn’t know you could view them all together in one place. I do now though. With windows live you can link them all, and its really easy, so now I only need to open one account and every mail is there. I’ve also redirected my business email to the same account
- Inside my account I have 7 folders for email, all numbered, No1 is To Do, No2 is Blogging and so on. Whenever I receive an email I deal with it immediately. It goes in a folder, gets actioned or gets deleted.
That’s it really, ten minutes is all it took.
For a great video on dealing with email watch Merlin Mann from 43 Folders give his talk InBox Zero
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I just do labels in Gmail rather than do the folder thing.. I either action or delete it when it hits my email box.
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You can set up a Gmail account, then forward your hotmail to your Gmail. I have about six emails pointed to my Gmail inbox. I promise you, once you set it up, you’ll never look back.
And thanks for the comment!
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wow, that was quick and thanks for the advice. I’ll look into the gmail thing now
-Laura
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I use DIGSBY and add all my MSN/Y’Messenger/Facebook/ Twitter plus email accounts in hotmail/gmail/yahoo on it.
there is a tabulated e-mail summary for each e-mail account you add to it and can view via pop-up summaries of which e-mails you wish to read/delete/reply very easily.
Worth a look at.
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Windows Live client is a really nice program. About 6 months ago I needed to organize my email, so I decided to use the Live client. At first I did what you did, which was view multiple inboxes from within the client. I soon found this wasn’t optimal. What I do now is forward to my main account from the other accounts, including Gmail and Yahoo, as well as my other hotmail account. There are 4 accounts total. I only give out the secondary hotmail address, and use that for signing up for things online, keeping my main address private. Only the people who I want to see my primary address get to see it, when I reply to them. If I don’t know them or don’t want them to see my primary address I don’t reply
The big advantage of this system is only non-junk mail gets forwarded. If any junk creeps through I can just mark it as junk. This saves a lot of time as I rarely have to delete junk.
On Gmail. Loads of people rave about it, and I’ve had a Gmail account since it started, but I never found it a good system for managing volume email. The junk mail filtering is good though, so it is a handy “public” address, whilst forwarding to a installed client like Live, which I like a lot more. I guess I just really don’t like the label way of doing things – I found it easier to drag and drop into folders rather than apply labels – it suits the way I work. I’ve also found it easier to find old emails too with Live.
One final point – the installable Live client also supports reading of RSS feeds. I use it for a couple of feeds and it makes life a lot easier
Hope that helps!
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dominque..thank you for visiting, I’ll look into DIGSBY
tony..good to hear from you again, thanks for the advice..there’s so many options it seems with email accounts, i’ll look into live client, I do like the drag and drop method better than tagging
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