OK, OK, so I already tweeted this, but it’s interesting. Hillary Mason set up intelligent email autoresponders to deal with repetitive email enquiries and politely nag people for replies. It’s good stuff, and something I’ve never really got around to doing myself, for a couple of reasons (besides the obvious); I use Gmail, and to be honest, no two emails I send are the same.
(It’s an interesting overlap with Project India, by the way… I don’t know why I’m so excited about this year’s Group Projects. Either because they’re kind of real, or because I miss academia. Or both?)
The downsides of using Gmail haven’t really affected me personally, but thinking about it, I would like to be able to actually access my raw email to set up better, NLP-based filters. I have a lot of email filters, and a lot of labels, and a system that just about works (thanks to superstars and multiple inboxes). But, you know, it could be better, and despite IMAP access it doesn’t quite flow; if I wanted to process mail, I’d have to access it all on a random box, and then what? I can’t apply Gmail labels or superstars or mark as read, can I? I guess what I really want is to operate on both the protocol/content and the interface itself, and that’s asking a wee bit too much. Oh well. Time to hack on a communication platform that I can play with…
(credit to Craig, who linked me the video, and will complain if I don’t acknowledge his genius.)
My approach to email is best described as ‘one bucket fits all’. Countless addresses all forward to one Gmail account, which I attempt to keep at inbox zero with the use of a lot of filters. Some days it works, other days the definition of ‘zero’ would make a mathematician cry.
The problem with this firehose approach is that when checking email on a mobile client, or even if I’m offline for a while, there’s a lot of noise. Not spam, per se; I might read all these newsletters and group mails if I’ve got time, but when I’m in a rush, it adds a lot of overhead to my email-checking and gives me plenty of ‘new email’ alerts when said item is pretty low down the priority list.
Solution: Layer upon layer of forwards. This might not work for everyone, but setting up several different Gmail (or provider-of-your-choice) accounts that all forward to the bucket account gives you the luxury of information filtering. Use one address for the really important stuff, and make that inbox the one you check while away; everything else can wait.
Advantages: Less interruptions; any new email is bound to be important.
Disadvantages: You’ll run into problems syncing your bucket account with this ‘filter’ account; items you read while away won’t get marked as read, as it’s a different inbox, and you’ll need to CC yourself on sent items. There are possibly (probably) hacks to get around most of the technical issues, if you’re finding it problematic.
Changing stuff over to the new email address might also be a problem, and you might end up subscribed to newsletters and the like anyway; using it for new projects is one approach, ensuring a fresh and consistent start with a clearly identifiable information source you can check.
Extra layer of technological wizardry: Instead of using your @gmail addresses directly, use a hosting service to redirect addresses at your .com (or similar) domain. That way you can change which bucket the addresses go to, have several pointing at the same one, etc; all without anyone but you knowing.
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