organize my email

I had a folder of pictures people had sent me, dating back to 2002! I deleted some and forwarded the rest to one of my gmail accounts and then deleted the folder. I think I have now eliminated all the personal items from my entire work e-mail account!!! I will double-check to be sure, but YAY!

This particular folder was really wrenching to deal with, because there were e-mails my mom had sent me :( and they were pictures of her being out and about with friends. It was really hard to look at them.

The next step is to look at my address book and copy all the personal contacts into my primary gmail account’s contact list, then delete them from my work address book.

It sounds like I’m planning an exit strategy from work! I’m not; I just want to separate my work and personal stuff.

on my work computer now contains no personal mail. woo-hoo!

Got rid of another folder of personal e-mail on my work laptop.

I will be very happy when I get my laptop to the point where it only contains work-related stuff.

I eliminated a whole folder in my e-mail. Yay!

My work Inbox no longer has any personal stuff in it, but my Sent Mail has a ton, and I have some folders of personal stuff in my e-mail, too. So my baby step here will be to forward all messages from the personal folders I have on my work account to my gmail address, then delete the forwards from my sent mail and delete those folders.

The real reason for this goal is this: For years, I’ve had both my work e-mail and my personal e-mail both arrive in the Outlook Express inbox my work set up for me. I can tell which account each e-mail came to, but they are all interspersed. I’ve been increasingly uncomfortable with that. I want only work stuff in there. But I also want to know right away if I get a personal e-mail, which is why I had it routed to come to that account as well as to our main home computer.

Finally, a solution! I read David Pogue, technology guru for the NYT, and he recently wrote about how you can have mail go to your Gmail account and set it up so that if you reply to it, it will look like it came from the account to which it was sent, not from your Gmail address.

Perfect! I already have Gmail—that’s where my 43T notifications arrive. So now I will have all my mail sent there, and will keep Outlook Express open to watch for work e-mail and will keep a window open to Gmail to watch for all other e-mails. Then I can slowly delete or move all the personal stuff in my work inbox/sent mail. Once that’s done, I will mark this goal as complete. Since Gmail is so generous with space, I don’t feel the need to delete old stuff. I just want to clean up my work account.

I’m so happy to have a solution to this!

I’ve worked on this for the better part of 2 days. Ugh. But I’m now down to 435 messages in my Inbox. And I need to move on.

What I’m going to try to do now is spend a little time each morning on this, trying to delete (or move to a more permanent place) more messages than I got (and sent) the day before. If I can do this, I’ll slowly whittle away at them.

I don’t feel the need to ever have only a dozen or something crazy like that. There are too many things that are current but ephemeral issues. E-mails about such things can float in my e-mail for a while, and then can be deleted a week or so later. I’m hoping to get to the arbitrary limit of 100 messages in my Inbox and Sent Mail. And then I’ll whittle away at some of the other folders. I’m sure some of that stuff is outdated junk, too.

Meanwhile, a pat on the back to myself for wading through so much stuff!

It needs to be done.

Delete this. Copy that to My Documents. Forward this other thing to another e-mail account for saving, but saving where it isn’t in my face all the time.

Soooooo tedious. But needs must.

I must just focus on one message at a time, and not feel overwhelmed. What’s 1239 messages in my Inbox? And 1194 in my Sent Mail? Nothing compared to the great feeling of reducing them. Go me.

much more needs to be done, but the important thing is that I made a lot of progress.

And did a little happy dance afterward.

I went through all my Sent Mail and forwarded all my personal mail to my Gmail account. I don’t want to delete them; having them is like having old letters (of the snail mail ilk).

Scanning the content of these messages as I forwarded them was a real emotional rollercoaster!

Anyway, I now have no personal Sent Mail on my work computer. Now I need to do this with the Inbox.

Both my Inbox and my Sent Mail are under 800 messages now! That sounds like a lot, but this is progress for me.

After all personal messages are gone from my Inbox I can work on whittling away at the work stuff. There is stuff I need to keep, but there’s probably also a lot of junk.