So last night I had an email crisis on my hands. Thanks to Scott Raymond, and other PvP fans in the know who helped me sort it out.
Last year, I signed up for Google Apps and started letting Google’s servers handle the email for the pvponline.com domain. It’s awesome because all my mail is accessible from any device via Gmail and a web-browser. I can also download it to local computers as if it were a pop account. Perfect, right?
The problem is that I never sort my mail, server-side. I only organize it locally. Which means my gmail is one big inbox with over a year of email that’s never been sorted, archived or deleted. So tonight, I decided to try connecting to my email via IMAP due to a friend’s recommendation. Imagine my surprise when my iphone tried to download tens of thousands of headers. Guh.
So now I grok Gmail a bit better. I’ve archived everything I want to keep and gotten my inbox down to zero. Now as new mail comes in I’ll sort, archive, delete as I go. My inbox will act more of a to-do list. And using IMAP, when I organize email on local machines, those changes will be reflected on the server. Whew.
Required reading: Merlin Mann’s INBOX ZERO. Learn, love and live.
