Leo: March 2006 Archives
If you get a lot of email, think about how you deal with it as you process it. Chances are you see who it's from, or who it's too, or perhaps even what it's about, and based on that, you decide what to do with the email. You might respond to it immediately if it's from someone important. You might leave it for later if it's a subscription to an email newsletter. Heck, you might even delete it if it's from someone you never want to hear from again.
(I'm going to assume, for the moment, that your spam is taken care of elsewhere. Obviously in most cases, deleting spam is probably a goodly portion of what you're doing too. Dealing with spam, however, is a topic for another day.)
Wouldn't it be nice if you had someone to sort your email for you? Show you the email that's most important to you first? Perhaps even collect all those email newsletters for you to read and peruse later, when you had the time? Perhaps even completely filter out the email that you simply don't want to see?
Well, you already have such an assistant.
Inbox Rules.
I spend a good portion of my life in Microsoft Outlook (2003, the most recent version). For various reasons, Outlook has become my email program of choice since before it was even called Outlook. That's not to say I haven't looked at other email programs. I keep a copy of Outlook Express ready for answering people's questions. I have Mozilla Thunderbird installed for it's newsgroup reader, for the available email encryption add-on, and for it's ability to just "suck up" email in raw, plain text. I even have a copy of a non-GUI email program called Pine, and regularly use the the old Unix/Linux plain vanilla workhorse "mail".
Apparently a lot of my life revolves around email.
Unless you're a geek like me (and heaven help you if you are), you don't need a long list of email programs. You probably just need one. The right one, of course.
So which one do you need? And how do you choose from the tens or perhaps hundreds of other choices?
How do you choose what email program to use?
