Organize your email accounts.
How many email account do you have? I personally have 7, and more to come. Why so much? You may ask, to me it’s all about getting things organized. In this information age, one would be involved in so many Internet activities that will require email account for registration. Social networks, forums, blogs, newsgroups, membership websites, affiliate networks and many more. All these require email account in order to register, receive updates or receive newsletter. So ask yourself, is one email account enough for all of these?
In my case, all these information don’t cross, as each kind of activity has its own associated email account. Let me get in details here. Categorize the activities you are involved in on the Internet, give each of these categories an email account. Look at my example below.
- Blogging – One email account.
For blogging purposes. Using this to comment on other blogs, to receive notification from your own blog. - Affiliate Networks – One email account.
Sooner or later, you’ll be involved in this online activity to get you some extra pocket money. I have one email account to deal with all these activities on CJ and Clickbank. - Forum – One email account.
I am not sure about you, I do frequently subscribe to forums, and forum threads that deliver useful information. Updates will be sent to your email account registered in your forum profile. - Advertisement Networks – One email account.
Google Adsense, Google Adwords, TextLinkAds, anything regarding website advertisement is associated with this email account. - Payment Services – One email account.
Paypal, 2checkout, e-gold and other payment related services. I will use this email account to keep track.
Imagine you have all these email accounts, hosted on a public mail service like Yahoo!, Hotmail and GMail. Are you going to login to the webmail interface one by one? This is like a pain in the ass. You will need a POP or IMAP mail client program, in which, I strongly recommend Mozilla Thunderbird. Both Hotmail and GMail support POP free of charge, while Yahoo! Mail will ask for extra USD$19.90/year for their Mail Plus service.
In Mozilla Thunderbird, user is allowed to create unlimited email folders, each associated with its responding email account. There’s one feature in Mozilla Thunderbird which I like the most, “Master Password”. Master Password allows you to save all your email accounts’ passwords in one place, and use another password to encrypt and decrypt all the email passwords. This means you only enter the Master Password when you first run Mozilla Thunderbird, each email account will interact with the mail server using the stored passwords.
This trick will save your time greatly, while all you need to do every morning is to check your Mozilla Thunderbird mail client, instead of visiting multiple websites to receive updates. Mozilla Thunderbird is also a very useful RSS feed reader.