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GTD Cafe: Archive Your E-mail
July 2nd, 2008 by StephenPosted in Digital Apps, GTD, Productivity |
Welcome back! It's good to see you again. Please note that I am now publishing all new material at my hub site: In Context Blog
Mike St. Pierre of The Daily Saint is on vacation this week, so the GTD Cafe is one of my own suggestions.
Gmail is a remarkable free service that offers a massive amount of storage for your e-mails. In fact, there are “ Over 6886.008202 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so you’ll never need to delete another message.” What a deal!
One small problem, though, is that a free G-mail account does not have the professional cachet that an e-mail address based on your business has. This is the second small problem: an e-mail account provided by your web host probably will not have almost 7,000 megabytes of storage. Yet you will want to save nearly every e-mail that you receive, because you can.
My new small business is In Context MultiMedia.com, but I certainly can’t put ICMM @ g-mail on a business card! (Or can I? Topic of another post, I think)
A solution to this dilemma: set up your hosted e-mail account to CC a copy of every e-mail that you send and receive to a “secret” G-mail account. In this way you can archive and search all of your e-mail correspondence without worrying about what computer you are using, or where you might be in the world.
This came in very handy for me recently when I upgraded my laptop to a newer model, and my old e-mails (stored on the hard drive) were stuck there. The transfer was a real pain, and only partially successful.
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July 2nd, 2008 at 7:55 am
Another option is to use the feature in Gmail to retrieve email from an existing email account. For example, I have my own domain with a personal email address which is firstname@firstnamelastname.net. I configured Gmail to retrieve all mail from that mail server and delete from the server. Now all of my email is consolidated inside Gmail, I have other POP accounts I use the same approach with. The best part is that when I reply to a message that came into the personal domain account then the message header is set up so that the recipient does not know it actually came from Gmail. It appears to have come from my original domain. You can also set up Gmail to always send email from a “default” email address so your recipients never actually receive a “Gmail” email.
Hope that makes sense and I can explain in more detail if it is not clear.
July 2nd, 2008 at 8:14 am
A third option, since you control your domain name, is to use Google Apps http://www.google.com/a and then you can have multiple email addresses x@incontextmultimedia.com that run on the Gmail platform.
Personally, I prefer Rick’s suggestion, because having only one place to look for my email is good. Of course, they could be combined.
July 2nd, 2008 at 10:03 am
You can also set up “Google Apps for your domain” at http://www.google.com/a — equals — professional cachet+GMail
Moreover, as an extra precaution, you can use GMail filters to auto-forward messages another gmail or non-gmail account.
July 2nd, 2008 at 1:55 pm
And with Google Apps now you can in fact take your domain and create your own email address e.g. stephen@icmm.com and use gmail as your tool. It’s worth checking out.
Simon
July 3rd, 2008 at 5:47 am
Good morning,
Thank you for confirming for me that I do need to learn Google Apps. I have had it on a back-burner list for a while, and I suppose this is what I get for taking a shortcut!
Thanks for the great tips, I will move it up the priority ladder.