Mary Parker: Using Google email

More information about my email address

Is there something confusing about my address in a message I sent to you?

ACC requires faculty and staff to take email off the ACC server often and manage their email in some program off the ACC server. I choose to use Google mail to manage my ACC email. When you receive a message from me, it will show my ACC email address, as listed above, as the sender and when you hit "Reply" it will send your reply to my ACC email address as listed above. That's just what I want to happen.

If you look at details in the header of the message, you can see my Google email address for my Google account. While I will receive email sent to that Google address, it will not be categorized as ACC-related in my files of email, so I may not notice it as being related to our work. So please don't use my Google email address for messages related to ACC.

Are you interested in how you could use Google mail to manage your other email accounts?

Ellie Collier, a colleague of mine at ACC, wrote a page on how she did this.

I have not progressed in this to the point she does of having Google mail manage my personal email and keep it all separate. Here are the aspects I think are particularly useful:

I can easily manage all my ACC email from both work and home, through a program that is more useful than any email client I had been using on any computer.
It has an enormous storage capacity - more than I think I'll ever use. In two months of use, I have gotten up to using 1% of my capacity. And I haven't really deleted much. (I "clean up" about once a semester and haven't done it yet.)
I can archive messages to get them out of the Inbox, but to have them permanently available to me, and included in a search of my email. This makes it much easier to keep my Inbox fairly "clean."
Searching my messages is MUCH easier now. I can categorize messages by labels instead of folders, and each message can have multiple labels. Before I was using this, I was frequently annoyed because the subject line or even the body didn't necessarily have the one or two words in it that I'd like to later search on to find the message. Being able to assign labels has solved that for me.
It has a REALLY GOOD spam filter that, in two months of use, I have found to be more than 99% accurate at identifying what I think of as spam. So I don't even see spam any longer.
When I delete something, it goes into Trash, but is still available for 30 days and then it disappears without my having to do anything. That means that I can delete most "informational" messages as soon as I read them even if I may need to look at them a couple of weeks later to remind me of what room the meeting is in or something like that. (I'm still working on changing my habits to do this!)

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This page was prepared by Mary Parker. It was last updated on June 6, 2009 .