All the cool kids use Gmail. I’ve had accounts for years, but have rarely used them. I use my own domains, and when Google finally introduced accounts for business, I looked into it. I’ve always loved the idea of threaded emails. But I find it clunky in Gmail, and the whole app is slow to me. I’ve been using fastmail.fm for years, and because everything is a page refresh, I just open lots of windows. You can do that in Gmail, but it’s not as nice… Anyway, I’ve never loved Gmail. And I had my way of working.
A month ago I finally made the jump. I decided I could be a grown up and revise my email habits. I moved over for techy and nontechy reasons. The techy reasons involve cleaner headers and better spam handling. The nontechy reasons include integration with the other services, and a great address book that syncs with my iPhone.
It’s been rocky, but an okay experience. The plusses and minuses have been about even. I’ve really had to change the way I think about email and organization, and I struggle with that.
The biggest thing is Gmail uses tags, which I love. However it use them instead of folders, which I find clunky. You can emulate folders, but it’s just not the same. I lose emails. It freaks me out that everything is in one folder. Some get tagged, some don’t, so emails don’t land in the “folder” I expect them to be in, and then I can’t fnd them.
A couple weeks ago, I had an idea of reminders to help me not lose emails. Okay, I still lose them, but what if they popped back up at the right time? It turns out this already exists, as a really well built FREE service called FollowUpThen.com from Internet Simplicity.
When sending an email, BCC the service when you want a reminder, and it pops back up, on the same thread. If there’s an email thread I want to put off till Tuesday, I’ll forward it to tuesday@FollowUpThen.com, and then archive it. The thread pops back up on Tuesday. Perfect!
So now I worry less that emails will fall out of my field of vision, and subsequently I’ll forget to follow up. I follow up on ideas, conversations, deadlines, invoices, anything. Like so many good things, it’s dead simple, free, and works well.
I can’t recommend it highly enough.
