9 Steps to Perfect Email in using Gmail & MailWasherPro

Dealing with Large Volumes of Email is Not that Hard

15 July 2013
Melbourne Australia
@mr_internet

I get asked all the time how I manage email whilst working for a company of 400,000 employees, and also manage having 100,000 followers in social media, without getting viruses or going crazy with the volume of email.

I have found no one solution that works well, but rather a combination of services that act with as few interfaces as possible, and also deployed email for millions as well.

From the user side, this makes an email client a big deal when trying to manage work, and home life email, especially when trying to find a work email from home or a home email from work, making sure as few NSFW emails appear when searching from work. The first exercise here is to stretch the definition of ‘white lists’ and ‘black lists’ to white activity and black activity with white lists thought of as just friendly emails, and black lists (the opposite of white lists per above.

The first exercise is to make a list of black (things you are trying to prevent), and white (things you want to allow). It might look like this

White Activity	Black Activity
· Allow work email to be viewed at home · Allow non-work email to be viewed at work · Enable some 3rd part search tool to enable better search on work or home email	· Prevent non work email from mixing with work email viewed from work
· Allow a failsafe for all blacklisted email to go for a certain period of time so it can be viewed separately (to ensure accuracy or view what junk is being sent).	· Stop spam, malware, junk email and black listed (non-friendlies) from all emails
· Filter email at home to be work and non-work
· Create a secondary back up of work and home email that can be viewed at home or at work
· Allow archiving that can be monitored for accuracy and has some separate duplicity.
· Have only 1 interface required

My personal challenges requirements in this
I am a geek, sometimes crazy busy, sometimes less so. I want tools I can fiddle with when not busy or not fiddle with and still have everything just work. If I lose an important email I could lose my job

Keep it Simple

3 or 4 Tools

· 3 x Gmail Accounts – o Personal email sent to me@my-personal-domain.com spam and all o Work Email only Clean me@work.com o Work and Personal email clean me@my-personal-domain.com and me@work.com · Microsoft Outlook – (Home and Work Primary) · Firetrust – MailWasherPro (the best of New Zealand) – · Optional – Xobni for Outlook

What it looks like

Making it all work simply

· This looks a bit complicated, but I assure you requires little intervention once set-up.

· Step 1- Set-up 3 Gmail accounts

· Step 2 – I have 2 primary email addresses me@my-personal-domain.com and me@work.com

· Step 3 – Forward all me@work.com email to Gmail account 2. Note: you could send to account 1 but my work email is clean already by this stage, filtering again could mean a missed email, also I want a work only Gmail account.

· Step 4 – Forward all me@my-personal-domain.com to Gmail account 1, non-cleaned

· Step 5 – Set up a mailwasher pro account (or other filtering software) on your pc, and set it up that pulls in email from Gmail account 1 to filter spam, black lists, white lists etc.

· Step 6 – Set-up Outlook on PC to include now cleaned email from Gmail account 1, and email from Gmail Account 2 (already cleaned)

· Step 7 – Forward all now clean work and personal email to Gmail Account 3 (offers a clean email account in the cloud this could also be copied to another email cloud provider (Yahoo, Hotmail etc).

· Step 8 – Optional, install Xobni for outlook offers great archive searching.

· Step 9 – Enjoy email.

Summary & Redundancy

Email is important to me, and perhaps you also. I have been using this model for years. If my PC goes down, or I am traveling I have another PC /Mac/Tablet/Phone Internet café I can look at filtered or unfiltered email for work or home. If Gmail goes down, my email that was last backed up to the cloud is still there. The only better solution I can see is a mailwasher pro type app that works in the cloud rather than locally. Otherwise I think this might be as near perfect as it gets.

Got a better solution let me know

About The Author

After running an ISP or two, As product manager I went on to introduce business broadband in the UK and then several other cloud services  in the UK and here in Australia (man this dude is old).