skippy dot net

As someone who sends and receives dozens of emails a day, I'm kind of fussy when it comes to email composition. I hate top-posted replies, though I've come to grips with the reality that I'm in the extreme minority. I do occasionally top-post a reply when I compose it on my phone, where the interface does not support easy inline replies. Beyond that, though, I always edit my replies to post inline.

I despise long email signatures. There's little more annoying than receiving a one line email followed by a fourteen line email signature. And don't get me started on the confidentiality messages appended to the bottom of emails sent from business accounts! Also annoying are the "sent from my [mobile phone]" email signatures. I don't care if you used your iPhone or your Blackberry to compose your message to me.

But what's really been on my mind of late are subject lines. Writing a good, meaningful subject line seems to be a lost art. One of the users I support never types a subject. Every time I get an email from him, the subject is "<No Subject>", giving me no clue whatsoever as to the relative importance of his message. He could be asking for help, or simply sharing an unrelated picture -- I have no idea until I open his message.

This works to his extreme disadvantage, of course. I often prioritize what messages I'll read in my inbox based on the subject line. If I get a couple messages at the same time, I'll skim the subject lines looking for things that need immediate attention. I'll read and address any such items. Then I'll get around to reading the "<No Subject>" messages, and dealing with them.

Another user I support often describes his entire problem to me using nothing more than the subject line. I've come to appreciate that: it helps me do my job more effectively, and I usually end up providing better, and more timely, support to him. Now if only I could get him to disable his 14 line email signature...

When sending personal emails to friends and family, I usually use a single word or short phrase to provide an indication of the message's contents. I don't want to send a "<No Subject>" message, nor do I want to communicate solely through the subject line. So I try to set the tone of the email through the subject line.

Thinking more about this issue, though, I begin to realize that I almost never use the subject of an email later. I don't browse through my email archive looking for that message with a specific title. Instead, I search for relevant keywords. Only then do I skim the subject lines of the search results to filter for what I'm looking for.

Do you use subject lines? Do you care about their contents?

I've been looking at outsourcing my email, and after writing that post I signed up for the Google for Domains service. What follows are my initial thoughts now that I've started using it, as well as some suggestions based on my experiences thus far (mostly aimed toward my family, who are now also using Google for Domains).

The Google Control Panel is extremely easy to use. It took me all of four minutes to get things set up. Google makes it easy for you to use links to your own domain in order to access their services, and they even provide to you the necessary DNS changes in order to support those custom URLs. So instead of http://mail.google.com/a/example.com, you can use http://mail.example.com. The same goes for docs.example.com and calendar.example.com. Adding and managing users is similarly easy.

I selected Google for Domains primarily for their email service, so that I can stop managing my own MTA and anti-spam tools, so that was the bit in which I was the most interested. I host a handful of domains for my family, and I wanted to make sure all their vanity email accounts remained. Thankfully, the Google control panel allows you to associate additional domains to the primary domain, and again they provide instructions for setting up the DNS MX records as needed. The one catch to this is that an email address is valid across all the domains you define. So if I define domains example.com and example2.com, email sent to user1@example.com and user1@example2.com will be delivered to the same user. This isn't a big deal for me, but it might be a gotcha for others.

I've been accessing my email for the last several years by IMAP, using Mozilla Thunderbird. I have a handful of folders into which I organize my mail. Not having spent much time with GMail in the past, I was a little worried about workflow changes that might be required of me. In particular, I was worried that all the thousands of messages I've been saving over the years would be stored in one gigantic Inbox, and I'd see the gigantic list of messages every time I logged in. Thankfully this was not the case, and importing all of my old mail into Google Mail was an easy (if extremely slow) process.

Google's web-based mail system does not use folders like Thunderbird; instead it uses labels. Labels are just that: it's a term you apply to a message. You can then filter the list of messages you see in the web-based interface by label. Messages can have more than one label, which provides some additional organization convenience over folders, since a message can only be stored in a single folder at a time (unless you copy it into multiple folders, but then deleting the message from one folder will not automatically delete it from other folders into which it might have been copied).

By default, messages do stay in the Inbox, even after you label them. It's easy to move old messages from the Inbox, though, through the use of the Archive button. When a message is marked "archive" it is removed from the Inbox, but remains accessible through search and label filtering, as well as the special "All Mail" display. In essence, labeling a message and then pressing "Archive" is the same as moving a message into an IMAP folder.

Google Mail does provide IMAP access, so you can use a traditional mail client if you prefer. Importing messages requires that you connect via IMAP. When accessing your mail via IMAP, the labels you created are presented as IMAP folders. If you place messages into the Google Inbox, they will be visible in the Inbox when using the web-based interface, as well. If you place messages directly into a Google label-as-IMAP-folder, it will acquire the appropriate label and be automatically archived, preventing it from being displayed in the Inbox. So the process of importing all my old mail was simple: define a new IMAP account in Thunderbird for Google Mail and then copy messages from my old IMAP folders into the corresponding Google label-as-IMAP-folder. I elected to create the labels in the Google web interface ahead of time, for no particular reason. I assume you can create new labels-as-IMAP-folders using Thunderbird and have that work the same as if you create the label first.

Switching to the web-based interface for Google Mail will take some work, but I've already found a compelling reason to make it worth my time. Using filters I can apply labels to messages as they come in. Then, I need only click the "Archive" button when I'm done reading to have those messages automatically filed. This is a terrific way to streamline the organization of my messages. When using Thunderbird, I'd have to manually move each message (or selected group of messages) to the appropriate folder. I would often miss the intended destination folder, and end up filing messages in the wrong location. Using Google Mail, I can ensure that mail ends up where it needs to go before it even comes in to me! All my mailing list messages are now labeled automatically, as well as mail from my family. I only ever need to click the "Archive" button now, which makes for a pretty easy to remember workflow.

I installed the FireGPG plugin in order to be able to use GPG signing and encryption from within my web browser (although I hardly ever encrypt anything, much to my disappointment). I'm now skimming the list of Greasemonkey scripts for GMail and will probably also investigate a few Firefox add-ons to see if there are additional ways to make my Google experience even better.

So far, I'm pleased with what Google offers, and I'm happy to get out of the mail administration game. I'll soon be able to downgrade the VPS service I use, since I no longer need the additional memory or disk for email processing and storage. I'm looking forward to sharing a calendar with Carina. And while I doubt I'll make use of the Google Docs service, it's nifty to know that it's available to me should I find a need.

For many years I've been an ardent supporter of the "do it yourself" approach for server management. I used to run all of my websites and mail servers from my personal DSL line using a computer in my spare bedroom. Earlier this year, I finally got fed up tending to the hardware and purchases a VPS account at TekTonic. This has served me better than I expected, and I've felt extremely liberated not having to fuss with hardware.

I'm growing increasingly tired, now, of managing my mail services. It's no longer interesting to me to keep up with the latest anti-span tactics, or to restart the mail services when they fail for whatever reason. As such, I'm seriously considering letting someone else manage my email services for me.

I know several people who use -- and rave about -- webmail.us. I'm comfortable paying for someone else' expertise in email management, so I'm willing to fork over a couple bucks a month for a reliable email system I don't need to babysit.

I also see that Google for Domains is available to me, and for free. I'm not entirely keen on the idea of letting Google hold all of my email (plus all my family members' emails), but I'm not so opposed to that idea as to rule out Google altogether.

A quick skim of some of the reviews of Google For Domains suggests that it should be satisfactory for my needs, and will offer a number of additional benefits which may or may not be useful to the family (shared calendar, for example). I think I might give it a shot...

More than two years ago I wrote a small essay about Identity and Self-Expression. That essay was written in response to Chris' submission to the Gravatar contest. At the time, I advocated for people to use whatever identity they wanted to use when communicating online. I still generally support that position.

It was extremely interesting to me, though, to review the email addresses people used when checking in for the Ohio LinuxFest. Of the people who registered with a GMail address, the overwhelming majority of those people used their full name as their email address in the form first.m.last@gmail.com. A smaller percentage of folks omitted the middle initial.

I've been mulling this over for quite some time. I'm not entirely sure what to make of it, if anything; and I don't have a larger body of email addresses against which to compare to determine if a lot of people are using their full name, or just some sub-section of tech- and net-savvy geeks. I personally find it interesting, but find it hard to articulate specifically why.

Do you use your full name for your email address? Why?

I listened to Inbox Zero, a presentation by Merlin Mann about managing email and your inbox. I was pleased to discover that I've already been doing on my own much of what he suggests.

I don't use any filtering or automatic filing mechanisms on my mail, except for Thunderbird's junk mail filter. All my mail comes into my inbox, and I read all of it. I have made very conscientious decisions over the years about the mailing lists to which I subscribe, and what sorts of things I want to receive by email. I'm only on a few mailing lists, all of them with low to moderate traffic volumes. It's relatively easy for me to stay abreast of mailing list traffic because I specifically subscribe only to those lists on which I know I will participate. (I use the same discipline when subscribing to news feeds: I only subscribe to those feeds which I know I'll read regularly.)

I deal with most of my mail as soon as I receive it. I try to keep less then 30 items in my inbox, although I generally feel uncomfortable if I have more than a dozen items. I've only just recently started deleting email -- I used to keep every single email I ever received. My rationale for keeping all mail was that I could refer back to it later, if I needed it. After some careful self-reflection, I've learned that I don't often refer back to previous email. So where I would keep all SVN commit emails before, I now delete them after reading: they're archived elsewhere, so I don't need to keep a duplicate copy of them.

I do still keep a copy of most mailing list messages, as well as personal email directed to me. Merlin Mann suggests having a single "archive" folder, into which you dump all your saved messages. He specifically recommends against getting bogged down in taxonomy and classification minutia when saving emails. I don't use a single archive folder, but I also don't get bogged down in classification and labeling. I have a "Ham" folder, for all personal emails. I have one folder for each mailing list, so that I can easily go through that list's mail history if I need to refer to a previous message (this is usually faster than searching the lists' online archives). I have folders for online shopping receipts, feedback from my website, and a couple of primary vendors (my ISP, my VPS provider, PayPal). I have one folder for email from each of my daughters, and one for email from my wife. In all, I have 23 folders. When I'm done with an email message, I drag it to its final destination, and leave it there.

At work, I break things down a little more. I create a folder for each person in my department, so that I can easily see my correspondence with them. I have a folder for each of the vendors with which I interact. I've found it very helpful to have this level of organization, but it doesn't get me bogged down trying to figure out where to file something. For departmental contacts and vendors, I do often review back to previous discussions, so having their messages grouped in a folder makes such review fast and easy. For email from folks around OSU, I store them all in a single "OSU" folder, since I only infrequently need to review past discussion. At these times, I find it acceptable to simply search for (or sort by) the sender's name within the folder.

One analogy that I've found particularly helpful as I learned to deal with ever increasing volumes of email was to think of my email program as a physical desk. I only have so much room on the top of the desk, so I should prioritize what items remain there. I leave items on the top of my desk if they need my attention. In the same way, the items that I leave in my inbox are those that need my attention: either a lengthy, thoughtful reply, or some other action is required by them. I don't keep old memos or notes on my desk at work: I file them (sometimes in the circular file). Likewise, I don't keep old email messages in my inbox: I file them. I can access them if I need them; but they don't overwhelm me or get in my way as I deal with current issues.