Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
that I need to have accounts for each major type and provider (including IMAP, POP, iCloud,
Exchange, Gmail, AOL, Outlook.com, and Yahoo) for testing purposes because I write about
email. But I know lots of people who accumulate accounts (especially free accounts) for no
particular reason and then end up wasting time and effort checking, managing, and main-
taining them all.
So, allow me to make a few suggestions to make your life simpler and to make Mail in OS X
and iOS work better.
Begin by choosing one account to be your primary
personal
email account. (Of course,
you may need to keep work email separate, and that's entirely reasonable.) Then, rather
than send out change-of-address notices to anyone who might have each of the other ad-
dresses—assuming you can even remember who has which one—visit the Web interfaces for
all other accounts, set them up to forward incoming messages to your central account, and
disable those accounts in Mail on your Macs and iOS devices. Once you've performed this
one-time procedure, your correspondents can keep using your old addresses, but you benefit
by having just one place to check for incoming mail and one place to store the messages you
want to save. Having fewer accounts to check will make Mail peppier, too.
If you have numerous providers from which to choose, which one should you pick for your
main email account? Here are my opinions:
• Choose an account that supports either IMAP or Exchange—not a POP-only ac-
count.
• Choose an account that lets you use your own custom domain name. For ex-
ample, I own the domain name alt.cc, and my main email address is in that
domain. Because the domain name is under my control, I can move my email
from one provider to another with minimal fuss—and have done so several
times. If you don't own your domain name, you're stuck with a single provider
forever—whether that's Gmail, iCloud, your local ISP, or whatever—even if the
provider has security or reliability problems, lacks features you want, or raises
its prices.
• All things being equal, look for a provider that offers a generous storage quota,
good server-side filtering and, preferably, server-side spam filtering. You'll ap-
preciate the flexibility of these features in the long run.
Optimize Your Mailboxes
For both email messages and files, I prefer a hierarchical organization method to one based
solely on tagging/labeling and searching. However, I used to take this to extremes, with more
