You have probably heard of books like Simply Your Life and blogs like Zen Habits and Minimalist. These resources are all about decluttering the stuff that surrounds you, and the aim is to free up your mind to focus on what’s important in your life. Decluttering is basically the art of getting rid of stuff you don’t need.
There are lots of thing one can declutter in life, most people will start with their bookshelf or perhaps their desk at work. I recently did a successful clean-up of my emails and thought I’d share my experience to anyone else that is lost in the email cluttersphere (just invented that word). Here we go…
Why declutter your email accounts?
If you are anything like me, you have amassed a few email accounts throughout the years. One of my first accounts was with Hotmail, then I used Gmail and then when I got into blogging I set up separate email accounts for my sites. In the end I found myself with five active email accounts (and lots more inactive) and just the process of checking all of these on a daily basis was putting grey hairs on my head. Not to mention trying to check them all on my BlackBerry!
What options are there?
One obvious thing you can do is close down all but one account. You would only keep the account that most people use when they email you, just be sure to tell everyone that you will be closing the other accounts within say 60 days. If that works for you, happy days!
In my case I simply can’t use one account, when running blogs you really should use an email address containing the domain you are blogging on. Furthermore, I have registered my Hotmail account with a good few online services, my Gmail account with lots others so it would be a project in itself just to change these settings.
My best option was to bring all accounts into one. I bet there are a few good ways of doing this but I was recommended using Gmail, as Google's email application is free and extremely flexible.
How Gmail can import all your email accounts
Where it lacks in style, Gmail certainly makes up for it with features. One of these is the ability to import other web-based email accounts (such as Hotmail) and any regular email accounts connected to your site or blog via the SMTP or POP server.
I shan’t get too technical and neither does Gmail to be honest, all you need to do is click on the Settings tab, then Accounts and Import and punch in your passwords.
When this is complete, you will have one inbox for all your email accounts, in my case this was five streams of emails coming into one inbox.
But what about sending emails from Hotmail/Yahoo in Gmail?
Once you have imported your email accounts, there may be situations where you still want to send or reply from a specific account and not the 'master' account. Whether it's sending an email from Hotmail/Yahoo or any other email provider, you can still do that in your new Gmail setup. When you create a new message, you get to choose which account to send it from, just like it would when you use Outlook (simply change the "from" field).
The result: email bliss
So I have gone from checking five separate email inboxes every day to merely checking my new aggregator service Gmail. And it works great on a BlackBerry and/or an iPhone as it’s all in one place.
It took me six months to get around to doing this but it only took a couple of hours of execution. If you are struggling with your emails, please heed my advice and simplify things now. If you have any questions on the process of decluttering your emails, just let me know in the comments section (or ping me an email to ANY of my accounts!).
How many email accounts do you have? And do you really need all of them?
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