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Email - Use and abuse, part 1

I recommend you have two email addresses for personal use – a public account and a private one. They are separate from business email addresses. These accounts should not be from your ISP. If you change ISP, you lose your old address, a painful prospect. Your email accounts should be either at a domain you own or from a free service. I recommend Google Gmail and Yahoo Mail. Yahoo provides 1GB of storage and Gmail 2.76GB, which is over 135 times the size of an Optonline 20MB account. One is your public account. I prefer Yahoo for this. I recommend Gmail for your private account.

You can integrate them into an email client, such as Outlook Express. They can also be accessed by web browser, so you can use your email most anywhere. These services are highly reliable, so you will usually be able to send and retrieve email. They have great search capability. When you need to find a message, you can. Moreover, you can stop deleting messages since storage is plentiful.

You use your public account if you buy something, subscribe to a newsletter or a forum. This account will get lots of spam. Yahoo and Gmail are very good at filtering spam into their Bulk/Spam folders. Yahoo does not count anything in the Bulk or Trash folders towards your 1 GB limit. Gmail does include the Spam and Trash labeled items in your total.

You use your private account to send email to friends, relatives or other trusted recipients. It should not be given out willy-nilly. The public account is the first choice when giving out your email address. You can always switch a correspondent to your private account later. This greatly reduces or even eliminates spam in your private account.

Yahoo lets you store old messages in sub-folders you create in the “My Folders” area. Therefore, you can have a “Purchases” folder for keeping track of your purchased items and an “eBay” folder if you buy or sell there.

Gmail is different from other email systems. I think it is better. Gmail groups related emails as conversations rather than listing each one separately. Therefore, you do not have to search for a specific email. If you locate the conversation you will see the item you want, and in context of all the emails in the conversation.

Gmail does not use folders. Instead, it uses a labeling system similar to the HTML meta-tags that help search engines detect what is on a web page. Gmail uses a filter system to display lists of email messages. There is no inbox, trash, or spam folder. Instead, there are emails with those labels.

You can create additional labels and use multiple labels on a single email/conversation. Organizing and searching your email is easier because you are not forced to decide where to file it. Suppose I send you an email about how to defragment your hard drive that you want to keep for later reference. In most systems you have to decide on where to store the item. Does it belong in the “tips” folder, the “hardware” folder or the “RHFtech” folder? In Gmail it can be all three. It can have a “tips”, a “hardware” and an “RHFtech” label.

You can get a Gmail invitation at https://www.google.com/accounts/SmsMailSignup1 and sign up for a Yahoo at login.yahoo.com.