Magic pen changed my life!

[jack]

I've recently made a bit of an effort to become organised, to augment my (A) being getting up at 9.00ish[1], (B) wasting less or indeed no time at work (C) slowly achieving my todo list[2] (D) thinking about where my life should go[3] (E) spodding hopefully more interestingly and (F) the aforementioned personality transplant :)

Fear my being a man now, my son! :)

I've redone my email folders a bit, so they're more hierarchical, and separated out the pooh and tolkien folders into 'chat' and 'committee' and 'announcements'. nakedtoes and sonicdrift can be squeeful and flattered that they've joined the elect club of people who have a folder of their own[4] :) Tim and Justin *would* but since *most* of the emails from one are also to the other, they are for the moment still co-existing in "timjustin" though for some equality I reversed the order.

I do, in fact, want email with categories, so something can be in both 'tim' AND 'justin'. It'd also be useful for emails from Foo AND poohsoc, or from Foo AND about house-finding, or whatever. But I like having IMAP. Can anyone advise me what system I should be using? Ideally I'd like email available from a server by both imap and webmail, and sortable into categories. I won't go much further, since I think that's still currently unacheivable. Gmail? Any other service? Download to outlook? Write an imap wrapper for gmail?

I've bought a shiny USB pen drive thingy[5] and moved all my personal files from home and work onto it. It's great having my todo list there where-ever I go, which has been a sticking point in my having one before. I've also reorganises a bit so I can find stuff; now my main personal folders are: fic_mine; fic_other's; gakked (quotes, downloaded pics, etc.); life (finance, etc.); poetry (not large, but enough to clutter up spod); pooh (mainly minutes); roleplaying; tech (stored settings, encrypted passwords, etc); spod (partially finished posts, articles, emails, poetry (but not any more), thoughts, plans, todos, etc).

[1] Today I woke up at 8.50 and got up without prompting by alarm, but I was *that* sanguine about going to work :) Yesterday I did some geek shopping first (see para 3) and woke up at 8.00, like I do at Xmas :)
[2] Bike very soon, promise. And shortly car, maybe.
[3] I think for satisfaction I need to acheived something, but aren't sure if this should be 'well paid job' or 'family' or something more innovative.
[4] Later I'm going to spod an amusing list of pseudo-definitions of friends, of which this is one :)
[5] There was one that was a wireless connector AND a pen drive. Isn't that so cool? If not useful to me :)

Comments

[aldabra]

Gmail's good for searching by arbitrarily many criteria. This may mean it doesn't support folders; I haven't needed to know 8-) And I don't know what IMAP is either...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

Yes, from what I've understood gmail criteria are equivalent to folders, ie. if you assign one criterion to each email it's the same[1], but you can also assign more. But I've never actually *used* it.

IMAP is where you use an email client on your local computer to manipulate the mail which stays on the server. It sucks mightily on dialup, but it's good because (1) you get a proper interface, not just webmail[2] and (2) you can access the email from anywhere.

[1] Insert complicated and boring spraff about what assignment of criteria would be equivalent to subfolders.
[2] Though it's always getting better, it's still not as easy.

[aldabra]

Ah, possibly "criteria" is a technical term 8-) What I mean is I can type "crocodile" and it gives me all my mail which mentions crocodiles, so I don't have to remember who I was talking about them with. I don't have to have foreseen that I might want to search for crocodiles in the future. I haven't yet had a mail that I needed to track down that I couldn't find by content. (It doesn't always work first time, but that's typically because I've forgotten who sent it and so folders wouldn't work either...)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Ah, sorry, I was misunderstanding a bit. I don't know if it's the official google term, but I've seen it used in that specific sense somewhere.

I really, really do get emails that can't be searched for easily; 'to' and 'from' addresses can go so far, but some threads don't have easily differentiated words, so I would like folders or something too.

[satanicsocks.livejournal.com]

Adding multiple folders to an email is called labelling in Gmail.

I use it all the time and it really works for me, plus the searchability of the Gmail interface and its consistency across Windows, Linux and other people's computers.

While you can POP it you can't IMAP and the metadata is part of the web interface rather than the mail database. So, er, not quite what you're looking for. But gmail changed the way I handle email. For the better I might add.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I suppose, yes, IMAP would be tricky when mail is accessed in such a different way.

Though come to think of it, should/is metadata be in the header anyway? We should be able to specify keywords for messages, shouldn't we, that automatically become labels?

Maybe I will just give in and use gmail. And least with cantab forwarding is easy.

[satanicsocks.livejournal.com]

I forward it to a different account as well as gmail, for archive

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Goes without saying :)