Over many years I've been active user of information technology and devoted many hours to hunting best software, practices, and processes. This post is the first in series that summarize my experience in different areas of personal information technology. Though stuff may seem trivial and obvious to some readers, I hope you will find helpful hints here. In a sense, contents of this posts will be somewhat similar to wonderful O'Reilly "hacks" books.
This chapter is about my most important tool of the trade: e-mail. While some may argue that this technology is obsolete is is gradually replaced by instant messaging, ol' good e-mail is far from dead.
I'll start with simpler guidelines. If you find them too obvious, bear with me and skip to next ones - they may containt some useful information for you.
Guideline 1: Create and use a web mail account for your non-work e-mail
While you may hope to spend a log time with your company, things may change unexpectedly in this volatile world. If you change employer and have good relationships with your previous company (or system administrator, for that matter), you may try to negotiate forwarding a mail from your old account, but more often than not this is not an option.
To summarize, use work e-mail for work, nothing more.
Guideline 2: Do not use e-mail address allocated to you by internet service provider
Same reasoning applies to ISP-provided e-mails. Things change and at some point you may want to change internet service provider for whatever reason: pricing, quality, bandwidth, support. Now, do you want the fear of losing old e-mail address that you gave to all your friends, be the obstcale in your way?
Guideline 3: Two web boxes are better than one
As many of you, I use my e-mail that is not related to work most of the time falls into one of two major categories. First category is private messages from friends, family members, other interesting people that I know "in person" (Last words are quoted because in internet you may never actually meet the person and know him/her very well nevertheless). Second category is all kind of non-personal communication: mailing list messages (increasingly replaced by RSS feeds though), password reminders, Google alerts, financial affairs with Nigerian citizens... oh, wait a minute.
I found that it is useful to separate these two categories to separate web mailboxes. We'll call them private address and public address. Never ever publish your private e-mail, nor put it in any kind of web form. The only correct usage of this address is communication with people you know. As for public address, this is the kind of e-mail address you put into user registration forms, questionnaires etc. You may also put this address to all kinds of public forums, message boards. But if you do that, make sure that your e-mail address is mangled in some non-trivial way. Either do it yourslef or make sure that web software does it for you. We'll discuss e-mail mangling later.
The primary reason for that guidline is as follows: regardless of the countermeasures you take, your public e-mail will be eventually put into spammers lists. And, unless you are under protection of some kind of a spam filter, it will be extremely irritating to divide your important e-mails from throngs of penis enlargement recipes.
Even if you have spam protection that may make things even worse. Spam filters got better over the years, but even best of them may put some of your legitimate and important messages to quarantine. And what was the last time you checked your quarantine box? Oh, you did that yesterday and nothing was there? Well, that is because an important e-mail sent to you three week ago was shitcanned after two weeks on quarantine.
Guideline 4: IMAP - choice of the wise
Many users prefer convenient, snappy, and familiar e-mail clients over slow, idiosyncratic web interfaces to your inboxes. And usually the protocol of choice is POP. For two reasons: this is what everybody knows, and that is what most of webmail providers support.
All goes well as long as you use only one computer to access your inbox. However, POP access becomes a nightmare if you want to access your inbox from many different places. You have two options when you pull your mail from the server - either you leave your messages on a server, or you delete them.
If you choose former way, you cannot access old messages from new workplaces, you end up with your messages scattered across local copies on many computers, usually inaccessible from the outside.
If you chose latter way, you will be able to access all messages in your inbox at any place. However, if you use local folders to organize your mail, you have to create these folders and sort your every message as many times as many computers you use to access your mail. Besides that, you cannot use advantage of mail folders, if you access your mail via web interface - you can get your messages only from inbox, not from custom folders.
Unfortunately, webmail providers that support IMAP are in minority. Personally, I would recommend Fastmail. You can even access GMail via e-mail if you set up gmailproxy.
That's it for the first time. Next issues in that category will be about Palm applications, setting up SSH tunnels, and may other topics.
Posted in Personal Technology | Software frolov's blog | add new comment
Submitted by frolov on Fri, 2005-02-04 21:57.
