email identity crisis

[Chris Janicki]

Netscape (version 6 at least) allows you to configure multiple mailboxes 
for handling just such situations.  But realistically, you have to start 
paring down on duplicate accounts!  (Why 2 accounts on your home 
server?... make one alias to the other for God's sake!)  Maybe use one 
of those "on vacation auto reply thingies" on old accounts to inform 
users of your preferred address.  Do that for about a year and you 
should be safe.  For the other accounts (mediaone, pager, etc.) have 
them forward if possible.

Peter R. Wood - Lists wrote:

>Hello fellow emailers,
>
>For years now, I've been living with an email identity crisis.
>
>I have a surplus of email accounts in various places: three different
>accounts at my alma mater, two free webmail accounts, three accounts on
>open-source community boxes, a mediaone.net account, an account at my
>webhost, two accounts on my home linux box, and even an account for my pager.
>Yes, I'm quite certain that many of you have even more email accounts laying
>around than this, and maybe my problem isn't as big as it seems, but it does
>feel that way. Anyway.
>
>I go back and forth with methods for keeping track of it all: at some points,
>I didn't forward any of my email accounts, but instead used fetchmail to
>periodically poll them. At other times, I forwarded all of my email accounts
>to one address, and then pulled from that one. Sometimes I would pull the
>mail to a linux box and read it with pine or mutt. Other times I would pull
>it to a MacOS box and read it with Outlook. And I've tried nearly everything
>in between.
>
>Realistically, there are perhaps four accounts at which I receive email with
>any regularity, but there is always that slim possibility in the back of my
>head that maybe, just maybe, someone will try to reach me at a not-so-current
>address.
>
>So I'm asking you on the BLU list: How do you manage your email? Where do you store it,
>how do you read it, where do you have email sent to, etc? My hope is that
>through hearing some other folks techniques, I might be able to develop a
>*sane* solution for reading and responding to my email.
>
>One small note - my work-related email doesn't figure into this equation...
>I've done a very good job of keeping it for use only in work-related matters,
>and I only check my work email from work, so that issue is solved for me. :-)
>
>Thanks,
>
>Peter
>