As my email is on my phone, I almost never proactively check my mail—instead I check it in a reactive manner. All my email addresses forward to a central email which is synced to my phone. Once email arrives, I check its contents and either:
archive it if I don’t need to respond or need it for anything
mark it as read if I want to read it later or it requires a response
mark it as read and star it if it is really important (assuming I don’t deal with it immediately)
Additionally, I have a pebble smartwatch which notifies me when mail arrives so I can keep my phone on silent, and I use the awear pebble app so I can star, mark read and archive emails without looking at my phone.
I also use a custom email domain with google business apps (basically gmail but with a custom email address). I have set it up so that I can put anything before the @ in the email address, and it will still reach my inbox. That way, everything I sign up to can have a personalised email address e.g facebook@mydomain.com or massdrop@mydomain.com. If I start getting spam from somewhere, I can often figure out where my email address leaked from, and forward everything to spam from that address.
everything I sign up to can have a personalised email address e.g facebook@mydomain.com or massdrop@mydomain.com
You can also do this with GMail—if your address is bob@gmail.com, bob+anystring@gmail.com and bob+anystring2@gmail.com will reach you (ie you can put anything after +).
This is a useful tip. However, I find that many sites do not accept email addresses with + in them.
In the past I also found that I sometimes could not remember what I had added after the +, or even that I had put a +, so I could not sign in. Now I use a password manager so this part is no longer a problem for me.
As my email is on my phone, I almost never proactively check my mail—instead I check it in a reactive manner. All my email addresses forward to a central email which is synced to my phone. Once email arrives, I check its contents and either:
archive it if I don’t need to respond or need it for anything
mark it as read if I want to read it later or it requires a response
mark it as read and star it if it is really important (assuming I don’t deal with it immediately)
Additionally, I have a pebble smartwatch which notifies me when mail arrives so I can keep my phone on silent, and I use the awear pebble app so I can star, mark read and archive emails without looking at my phone.
I also use a custom email domain with google business apps (basically gmail but with a custom email address). I have set it up so that I can put anything before the @ in the email address, and it will still reach my inbox. That way, everything I sign up to can have a personalised email address e.g facebook@mydomain.com or massdrop@mydomain.com. If I start getting spam from somewhere, I can often figure out where my email address leaked from, and forward everything to spam from that address.
You can also do this with GMail—if your address is bob@gmail.com, bob+anystring@gmail.com and bob+anystring2@gmail.com will reach you (ie you can put anything after +).
This is a useful tip. However, I find that many sites do not accept email addresses with + in them.
In the past I also found that I sometimes could not remember what I had added after the +, or even that I had put a +, so I could not sign in. Now I use a password manager so this part is no longer a problem for me.
True.
LastPass is a good password/login storer for people who want to try this out.