It’s very sad that Jim McKay is no longer with us. He was a great commentator and announcer and he will be missed.

Was looking on CNN this morning and ran across this story. Slow Movement story on CNN. There are some good ideas here. Not everything has to be done right now. Some of it can, in fact wait. Oh, and it shouldn’t have to be done by me. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Ok, so I did something really bold the other day. I consolidated all my email to one account. I had to do some odd hacking of a PLIST in Mail.app to make it work, but, it works well. This is about how and why I did it.

I use Mail.app and Mailtags to manage all my email. One of the things I realized was the time spent searching for folders to move a specific email to when archiving it. Having about nine email accounts things were getting a bit crazy. IMAP is my preferred method of storing my email, this is because of the iPhone. It’s important to be able to access email on the road as well as when at the computer. But that was getting cumbersome.

The first step was to create forwards for all the accounts. I decided that three email accounts were important for how I want to store and manage email. My .Mac account, my Gmail account and my Homes4Good account. I started the process by setting up gmail to accept and respond to all my email accounts except my .Mac and Homes4Good. Once that was setup, I deleted the accounts on the other servers and created a forward to push the email to Gmail. Next, I turned to my Homes4Good account.

I am the IT Director at Homes4Good and so I get to make some decisions about things that make my life easier whereas other’s might not be able to make the same decisions. But about two months ago, I moved all the Homes4Good email to Gmail for Domains. This was free for Homes4Good as a nonprofit. This gives Homes4Good a much better solution for email and storage and at a much better cost. It’s even branded as Homes4Good. Very nice solution if you need one. Even at $50.00 per user is reasonable I think. So then, I forwarded the Gmail and Homes4Good email to my .Mac account.

So now all my email is going to my .Mac account. But, there was one piece missing. That piece is that I need to be able to send as the user of those accounts and not just as my .Mac account. For example, when I send an email that is related to Homes4Good, I wanted my email address to show up as my Homes4Good email. First, I added the Homes4Good (Gmail) server as an outgoing server. But… by default this doesn’t have the only behavior I need. I need to be able to switch the address in mail. So I started looking in my com.apple.mail.plist file for something where I could control the drop down box. I found what I was looking for under Root > MailAccounts > 1 > EmailAliases. I just added two duplicate entries for the two other accounts. Saved the Plist and restarted Mail.app. Bam, it worked.

Now, all I need to do to send an email as one of my other accounts is to select the address, send server, and signature.

I am making extended use of Mailtags and smart folders to help me organize and keep track of email. This is much better, because instead of having about 15 or 20 Homes4Good folders I have one. I like this because if I need to find something I will use Spotlight or a Smart Folder to find it and organize it. I also have some special rules for applying tags to incoming emails. For example, when someone sends an email to the Homes4Good Help Desk mailing list, I automatically tag is so that it appears in my Homes4Good - Active IT Issues Smart Folder. Then I can move it out of my inbox and deal with it later. This keeps my inbox very clean, and I still have quick and easy access to the things I need to accomplish.

I have this philosophy that what’s the point of having that many email accounts when they all go to one place anyway. This makes me much happier with my email, and I can respond, organize, and cope with it easier. I would love to hear anyone’s comments or additional suggestions about it and how you are handling your email.