In 2007, I worked towards keeping my NUS IMAP account only for department admin, teaching and student matters. Everything else went to Gmail.
The volume of emails for with my volunteer projects Raffles Museum Toddycats and International Coastal Cleanup Singapore were too high for me to cope so I separated those out to distinct email addresses to keep my Gmail inbox manageable. The clarity of the separation helped with project management. And Mailplane enabled coherent management of multiple gmail accounts.
In Gmail I kept mailing list mail out of my inbox which kept it manageable. Eventually I migrated scheduling and collaborations with my research students into this inbox and it everything got messy again. As I scratched my head over how to gain control of my inbox once again, Google announced we were to look out for Gmail Priority Inbox!
I activate this new tool and am real excited to see how it can help me. It separates out “priority mail” based on your inbox behaviour and improves its predictions with corrections and affirmation. I am used to ‘training an app’ to improve its performance as I have been using Spam Sieve with Entourage and Mail for several years now.
It is looking promising; we’ll see. Still, technology will only go so far; eventually, some de-cluttering is on order!
Otterman speaks... 