email

You may be aware of the availability of email aliases as a way to organize emails related to different groups or functions into a single email inbox. Aliases are also sometimes referred to as auto-forwarders.

All an alias does it serve as a pointer for one email address to actually be sent to another email address automatically. For example if you sent an email to info@somedomain.com, that address may not actually exist, instead it may get forwarded to some guy named Bob (bob@somedomain.com) to respond to instead.

Email Aliases after a Red Bull

After playing around with the Gmail filter trick I mentioned in a previous post, I decided I could accomplish basically the same thing while using my own domain name and the use of email aliases.

I use my Gmail address as my “working” email account. It’s the one I’ve always used to manage my social media activity and the one I’d usually give to someone if they asked me for my email address. Since I upgraded to an Android phone, keeping my Gmail account cleaned up and organized for appropriate contacts has become more of a priority and requirement.

I decided to go gung-ho and implement my email filtering program as much as possible, while at the same time protecting my actual email address as much as possible. In doing so, I ended up saving myself a ton of time that I hadn’t actually expected as a fringe benefit.

There were a couple of steps I needed to take to get things going:

Setup a Catch-All Account for My Domain

Normally I don’t prefer to use a catch-all on a domain. If an email address doesn’t exist, I’d prefer it be rejected an identified as not existing to whomever sent the email. In this case though, I needed one.

I setup a new email account of filter@bnpositive.com and configured it as a catch-all account. Now any email sent to an address @bnpositive that doesn’t actually exist will be collected by this account. I the configured Gmail to collect email from this account using Gmail’s mail fetcher access functions.

Setup Gmail Filter for filter@bnpositive.com

I quickly setup an email filter in Gmail to automatically label any email received at filter@bnpositive.com with a label of “Newsletters” and to auto-archive it so it doesn’t appear in my Inbox.

Update My Email Address for All Current Subscriptions to A New Alias

Anytime I receive an email into my Inbox that’s some kind of subscription I’ve signed up for, I quickly look for a link to update my profile or change my email address. When I change my email address I’ll set my address to be some variation of the domain of the website I signed up for the email subscription from in the first place. For example, I’ve signed up to receive emails from The Nature Conservancy at the domain www.nature.org. When I updated my email address for them, I specified my address as nature.org@bnpositive.com.

Use New Email Alias for Any New Subscriptions

Now, anytime I need to provide an email address somewhere online, I’ll use an alias instead of an actual address on my domain.

The Results Even a Surprise

Initially, my goal for setting up these filters was to help me identify when my email address may have been sold to Company B after being shared with Company A. If I started to receive spam at one of these addresses, then I could assume the list has been sold or compromised in some other fashion.

The process of auto-archiving all of these emails received was initially just my attempt to try and simplify and organize my Inbox. That worked. What I didn’t expect to gain was all the time I used to spend reading all of these emails. You see I thought I’d go into the “Newsletters” folder/label in Gmail and catch-up on them every now and then. Instead, I find myself hardly reading them at all. It’s not that they’re not loaded with good information, it’s just that in the scheme of priorities, reading them is very low and I usually just don’t ever get to them. Every now and then I’ll scan through the folder to see if anything sticks out, but other than that I’m not reading them.

The only reason I haven’t deleted all 2574 messages already is because I’m not even close to my Gmail storage limit.

What email tricks do you use? One of the more popular tricks I’ve written about was Robby Slaughter’s suggestion of reversing your email composition routine.