CompiledMonkey.com

Email is becoming a problem for me. I have a lot of email accounts, 17 to be exact. Of course not all of them get more than a message a week and only 3 are ones I care to check every day. It’s not that I have too many accounts because they really do have their own purposes. The problem for me is managing these accounts in an effective way.

I took some advice and had most of these accounts forwarding to a set of more important accounts that then get forwarded to my main Gmail account. I then just tagged these incoming emails based on which account they came from. That gets somewhat confusing because it’s not a 16 -> 1 solution. It’s a few to one, a few to another, then those to a single. Yes, leave it to me to have a tree of email accounts. On top of that, since Gmail is POP only, I still have all of that forwarded email marked as new in their individual accounts. I should note that nearly every account is either Gmail or run by Google Apps, so POP is the only option. So anyway, that plan soon dissolved.

Next, the corporate world seems to love Microsoft Exchange. Everywhere I go is standardized on Exchange and Outlook. Each are great products but not universal. I’m a Mac nerd, duh, so I need to get that Microsoft platform to work on my Mac. Not only that, I need to be able to push calendar events, emails, tasks, etc, back through to the Exchange server from my Mac. Mail.app can handle the email side of that but it’s not the best experience, certainly not on par with Outlook. Microsoft Entourage, the Outlook for the Mac, is better of course and handles the calendar, tasks, and contacts. It’s only downside is the fact it’s not a universal binary. I guess the biggest issue is the sync functionality with my iPhone. I want to be able to sync my Exchange based calendar with my iPhone. But if that’s all I need to give up, that’s not a big deal. A positive would be that Office 2008 for the Mac ships in January, so at least it’s getting attention within Microsoft.

So what are my options here? Clearly I need to rid myself of POP based email. I must have the functionality present in IMAP/Exchange. That rules out Gmail, unfortunately. Do I set up my own server on compiledmonkey.com and provide myself with IMAP based email? Do I sign up for .Mac, pay $69/year, and get IMAP based email that way? Or, do I just get rid of my excessive number of email accounts and deal with two email clients open all day (Firefox/Safari for Gmail, and Outlook/Entourage for work)? I’d really hate to get away from Gmail, only because of the clean web interface and the threaded nature of the emails. However, it’s tiresome to go through the same email 3 times. I see it once in the Gmail client, about 15 seconds later on my iPhone, and once more in Mail.app when I get home that day. It’s just too much to look at without having my eyes glaze over.

Just as I thought I was getting close to having a single device to keep my daily information in order… I guess if I moved to IMAP based email and removed Exchange from my life, I’d be able to have a seamless process for everything on my machine and phone.

I’ve really enjoyed some of the recent books I’ve read. I’m in major need of some new ones! I think something on the history of the Mozilla Foundation would be great and possibly something about the history of OS X.

I think I liked “Dreaming in Code” so much because it talked about the details of a software project that a lot of books avoid. Sure, it’s boring to most, but I love it.

Anyone have recommendations?

Last week we discussed “Getting Things Done” on Kill The Desktop. I’m in need of this kind of process for my work life. I’m as guilty as the next guy for using my Outlook inbox as a to-do list. It hasn’t really gotten me into trouble, but I do forget things and simply have a hard time understanding everything I need to do in one glance.

What makes this harder for me is that I’m a Mac user. I can’t run Office natively on my Mac and I’m OK with that. I use Mail.app and iCal right now and my plan has been to use them once my new job starts. But again, I’m not really doing anything different to make myself more productive.

I started to search around a bit to see what I could find and ran across Chandler. That project was written about in a book I recently read called “Dreaming In Code“. Highly recommended! I happily read through their site to see if Chandler could help me. Sure enough it’s platform independent and follows the GTD principles. The problem, as is well described in the book, is that Chandler still hasn’t hit 1.0. Not that I care much about a version number, but if you read the site it explains that one release may not have a data format compatible with the next. Bummer.

Anything out there I should check out?