By Heidi Beguin If your email account is anything like mine, then it’s a mess. There are close to eight hundred unread emails floating around in there, mostly from companies I’ve never dealt with or at least don’t plan to deal with again. That’s terrible, you’re probably thinking, this woman has eight hundred unread emails and she’s giving us technology advice? Yes.
This email account is a Yahoo account and it’s specifically used for junk. I do peruse it often, but because I know the majority of it is messages I don’t care about, it doesn’t bother me that there are so many unread emails.
I also have a Gmail account and this is the one I use for family and writing clients. There are probably fifty unread messages in there but I do plan to do something about each of the unread emails.
Why two accounts? Think about the items you order online and how each of those companies wants an email address before you check out. They’re planning to send you an email of confirmation of your order, an email when your order is ready to ship, an email telling you the order is on its way, and they’ll even send you an email letting you know the item has arrived. None of us need all that information taking up space in our email accounts, but if the order doesn’t arrive, they may be necessary to prove you actually placed the order.
To combat all this junk, I created a second email account using Gmail. Gmail seems better at kicking the ads and promotional emails to the spam folder and I appreciate that. Yahoo just lets it all come through and I have to be the judge of what stays and what goes.
I also have downloaded a free app called UnrollMe. I linked the app to my Yahoo account (they walk you through this and make it very easy) and now have the power to look at all the addresses coming through and decide if I want to ‘unsubscribe’, ‘keep’, or ‘rollup’. ‘Unsubscribe’ does a good job of getting rid of all emails from the address I don’t want, ‘keep’ leaves emails alone that I still want, and ‘rollup’ creates a separate folder because I may not want those emails in my main inbox, but I still want them somewhere so I can go look at them when I’m ready.
Using two email accounts makes sense when you realize email addresses have become like gold to companies. They figure if they send you enough emails, at some point you’ll get curious and open them, possibly buying something from them. In order to keep important emails separate from all the junk, utilizing two different email accounts is the way to go.