Dr Shonzilla or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Email (part 1)
This is how I’ve learned to stop worrying and love the email, ultimately reaching The Email Nirvana.
A pattern-seeking prologue
As an übergeek I tend to play and work with technology on daily hourly basis. Over time I’ve realized how important it is to make the best of my time (as other smart people have I like to thing ;-)) by automating as much as possible and adding fault-tolerance where applicable.
Our thoughts revolve around inreasing amounts of information that we handle every now and then day. In the digital age, we handle various types of information - email, online and offline documents, contacts, multimedia, book/movie recommendations, music we listen - the list is growing every month. As our lifes become increasingly digital and online, we access and generate a growing amount of information everyday, and some of it we’d like to keep handy for future reference. This desire has grown into what is known as life caching trend.
On the other hand, there’s a trend of constant exponential advancement of information technologies makes it harder for us to catch up with the a growing number of increasingly powerful tools. With these two colliding trends sometimes there comes a point when we want or need to adopt a new (version of a) technology whilst making the transition from the previous one is not always the simplest/safest thing to due.
Next to web, the most frequently used technology is sure email, and sooner or later there comes a time to use a new email service or to switch to a new one. My essay on (life’s) email caching is the first and the most important aspect of life caching.
Diagnosis and patterns found
I bet that the vast majority of people reading this email have used at least one email address. Over 98% of you would prefer having all emails in a single place, rather than to force yourselves to make an effort (using mental categories/folders/tags) to determine where to look for that email someone sent you sometime in the past. Here’s how I’ve managed to keep everything in one place.
These are the criteria I have for my email (and I’ll explain why you should too):
- Longevity - email address that can become my online ID with time
- Availability - from several places (home, work,
mobilesmart phone, cybercafé,vacation point) - Organization - automagically with tags or folders, easily searchable
- Redundancy - in the case the main email storage is unavailable
Here’s why these criteria are important and how to satisfy them point by point.
Longevity
The best way to achieve longevity of you email is by relying on easily remembered email address at a reputable company. By “reputable” I mean that most of your geek friends agree with you that the company will not go out of business in foreseaable future which is like 5 years or until all our personal information (incl. emails) become a part of us. Many of us have reason to have more control over the email address (e.g. we want to use our personal internet domain) or to differentiate ourselves by using some special or more memorable email addresses (e.g. me [at] home [dot] com). What is sure - reputable company is doing a better job than you maintaining the installation (i.e. backing up your emails). Therefore, it is advisable to forward all your email to your email account at reputable company. Some examples of a reputable company are Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft with their corresponding reputable email services - GMail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail. There are some reasons not to consider Hotmail as an option, though.
Availability
This one is best achieved by having both web and IMAP access. Web-based emails are a common feature today, allowing you access with the most common user interface available today wherever you go and least restricted by corporate firewalls. Having IMAP access permits you to use your favorite email client (out of many). Many people have heard of POP3 (or POP) - something you configure once in your email client and then forget about. When talking about doing email from an email client, IMAP is superior protocol since to POP3 since IMAP makes it easier and less time consuming to access your email from multiple places. IMAP keeps all your email on the server which some may view as a disadvantage if you’re limited with disk quote (i.e. disk space on email server). I will not brag about why nowadays IMAP is a better choice than POP3. If you do not believe me check it for yourself.
Oranization
Organization is essential. Why? It may have been evident to you, but there’s something I need to assert. You and me are the same in one important aspect - we’re both pattern-seeking animals and we naturally seek patterns, order, meaning in everything we experience and that includes email organization. Emails, just as our books, work days, fun days are better if they’re organized. Organization means less of the bad stuff (stress, wasted time, miscommunication) and more good stuff (joy, efficiency, happiness). Depending on the choice of the provider for your primary email account, you can (and should!) create filters to automatically organize your emails by putting them into folders and tags. I prefer using tags, due to imanent nature of information where everything belongs to much more that one category. Luckily for information, it is digital rather than physical so you’re not forced to put it in a folder, drawer, pocket, whatever. The more organized you are, the more categories you’ll have, your email categories included. The more email you have (proportional to the amount of time you spend living in the Information Age) the greater will be your need for self-organization. Significant number of your emails will simply require using more than one category (i.e. tag). I know some people can’t escape thinking out of the box (or folder if you will) and will continue to use folders until the Judgement Day. That’s OK too, but having mind that having your filters set up for folders (instead of tags) will help the civilization postpone the Judgement Day for some time. ;-)
Redundancy
Redundancy is important both short-term and long-term. Short-term, you want to secure yourself from ocassional problems like not being able to access some part of the internet (due to routing problems or simply because your idiotic boss wants to improve your productivity by prohibiting you access to your webmail) or something much, much less probable (company was not reputable, earthquake or terrorists strike, God forbid). Speaking long-term you want to be as sure as possible that you’re prepared for whatever you haven’t had in mind short-term. ;-) To be redundant, fault-tollerant, and safe from the most of worst case scenarios you can use email account at another reputable company as your email backup storage. Just set up email of all your email from your primary email account to the secondary/backup account and you’re set. Additionally, you may want to set up automatic filtering for your secondary email account, so that emails are properly organized everywhere.
In the next part of the series I will finish my essay on how I’ve achieved The Email Nirvana.
