I’ve had a rethink of some of my email organization, and here’s the beans.

Now, I recommend having 3 key types of email address.

1. Correspondence
2. Purchases
3. Subscriptions

I have websites that I have accounts for. I also use gmail.  And all of my website email addresses are collected into several gmail accounts.  (I also have different gmail accounts for different business clients I do work for.)

But of all my personal (besides my busines clients) email accounts that I actually log into, there are only 2.

1. The first for personal correspondence as well as purchase confirmations.
2. The other for subscriptions.

This means in the correspondence and purchases gmail account I get fewer emails, and those that I get are ones I really want to keep a close regular eye on.  Various other email addresses are set up to either forward email to this account, or they are checked by this gmail account (gmail allows up to 5 other email addresses to be checked and downloaded into it).

The other gmail account for subscriptions is filled to bursting with all manner of newsletter subscriptions.  And I divide these subscriptions into several types, each subscribed with a different email address, as follows:

• I have a marketing subscriptions email address that I use for subscribing to marketing newsletters and update lists, etc.
• I have a general subscriptions email address that I use for personal interest newsletters, such as health, weight training, etc.
• I have a specific email address for one of my overall personal interests.
• And there are a couple others.

Gmail lets me label all emails that arrive for any of those email addresses with it’s own colour and name.

This means when I want to check all subscriptions on any of those major topics, I simply click on the label for it, and now all I can see is emails under that category.

This makes it far easier to navigate so many subscriptions.

And my other gmail account that collects my actual personal correspondence and my purchase confirmations allows me to stay in touch with urgent/important emails easily too.

Email management can be pretty tricky, and rigth now I feel like I’ve got a good balance by using this approach for email organization.

What do you think?  How do you manage your email?