We’ve all heard about Inbox Zero, where you try to reclaim your email, your attention and your life by clearing out your email inbox. I needed to reduce the number of inboxes first.

Those of us who have been on the Internet for decades have amassed a large number of email addresses on a variety of services. As time passed, and new services emerged, we added more. Most of us are loathe to close any of these addresses down just in case we get an email there. Which means setting them up every time we set up a new device, and checking them regularly. That is not productive!

Me, I have ten (10). Ten different mail servers where I can receive emails from. Not only that, but several of these implement many name variants, so I have many many more actual email addresses, e.g. hiltmon@xxx.com, hilton@xxx.com, hlipschitz@xxx.com, and support@xxx.com.

Ten is too much. So I reduced them to four (4). How?

Easily. You see, most email servers and services have the ability to auto-forward any emails received to another address. Most also allow you to delete the email once forwarded so you do not run out of space. All I did was set forwarding up.

So:

• My oldest, still active, email address from hotmail (now called outlook) now forwards to gmail.
• My second oldest account, which I never use, email address from yahoo also forwards to gmail.
• My family domain emails from lippies also forward to gmail.
• My last hedge-fund’s emails, agamascapital, have not been relevant all year, so they no longer forward anywhere, and I no longer monitor it.
• The company we set up after the last hedge-fund, envisioncp forwards to my current company email noverse.
• This site’s emails, hiltmon, forward to my company noverse as well, since I now treat this site as a writing platform and no longer a family photo site.

This leaves me with four (4) servers to check:

• noverse for all work related email
• gmail for all personal email
• shukaico for all Kifu email
• icloud for all Apple email (and I’m thinking of forwarding these to gmail too)

Now that I have reduced the number of inboxes, it’s a lot easier to process email. And it’s easier for people who email me to know which account to use (see the need in my Email Etiquette article).