JeffKirvin.net

I wrote a few days about about how my email solutions kept falling just
short of perfection. With a little help from those of you out there in the
blogosphere, I think I’ve finally hit the jackpot.

My solution is a little unconventional because, well, I’m still broke.
While I should have lots of money later this month, right now I can’t swing
FastMail’s highest level of service. I’ll get there. But what I have now
(for free, or at least using stuff I already have) is working pretty well.

The first thing I did was redirect my jeff@writingonyourpalm.net address
from GMail to FastMail. Thanks to folks on the blog (and counter to
FastMail’s own help documentation), I configured Outlook 2000 to use IMAP.
I then set up SnapperMail to do the same.

Now I had two problems with this initially. One was that I get about 10,000
spams a month, and FastMail’s spam blocking for their free accounts is
pretty weak. A ton of spam kept coming through. I get a lot of legit email
as well, but it’s probably 1% or less of my total mail traffic. I needed a
better filter.

As it turns out, I already had it, but hadn’t thought about it because I
was still “thinking in POP”. I have SpamBayes for Outlook, an excellent
trainable Bayesian filter. It does an increasingly good job the more “ham
and spam” it sees. I had it trained for my old PST file, so all I had to do
was tell it to monitor my IMAP inbox as well. Spam is dumped into my “Junk
Mail” folder on FastMail and marked as read. Suspicious but borderline
messages are also sent to Junk Mail, but kept unread to make them easier to
spot. These message moves are updated on the server due to the magic of
IMAP. Every so often I scan through the messages in Junk Mail and then
select all and delete. I generally don’t bother to purge deleted messages,
though, since this is a minor pain in Outlook 2000.

I have SnapperMail set up to automatically purge deleted messages when it
connects to each folder. It also picks up the updated location of spam, and
I have it set to download the first 12k of all messages EXCEPT the Junk
Mail folder, where I just download headers. Why bother downloading message
bodies I’m probably just going to delete?

So the end result is that as long as my PC stays on (and conencted to my
cable modem), my PC does my spam filtering for me and updates the server
accordingly. When I check my email with SnapperMail, I rarely see any spam
in my inbox. Neat!

My other problem was capacity. Spam aside, I get a lot of mail. I was
already up to 230MB on GMail after six months of use. FastMail’s free
service only allows 10MB of storage. How was I going to work around that?

As it turns out, this problem solved itself. One of the things I’d decided
to do anyway in the spirit of GTD was to handle email only once. That was
the whole point of the IMAP exercise. In this vein, it also makes sense to
delete most of the legitimate emails I get unless there’s a reason to hang
on to them after I get done processing them. Once I reply to a mailing list
message (or read it and decide no reply is necessary), I can delete it
rather than filing it. If I ever need it again, it’s in the message list
archive. Google means never having to keep a local copy.

So when a new message comes in, whether I’m in Outlook or SnapperMail, I
read it and then ask myself what, if anything, I need to do about it. If
the answer is nothing and it’s mailing list traffic, I delete it. If it’s
sent directly to me, I move it to my “Filed” folder. If it needs a quick
reply, I reply and then either delete or file. If it needs a lengthy reply,
I move it to the “Respond” folder with other things with which I need to
deal.

After a few days of doing this, my storage commit on FastMail is 176k.
That’s it. I’ll almost certainly upgrade later, but I’ve proven that
prudent processing can keep my inbox empty, my mind clear and I can get to
my email anytime, anywhere, and never have to deal with the same message
twice.