I’m finally trying to get my email in order. I looked this morning and saw that I have over 1400 messages in my inbox. For just one of my email addresses. Looking through them, I see that a fair percentage of them are emails from readers who probably would have liked a response. Often I get such an email, tell myself I’ll get back to it when I get home, or the next day, or whatever, and then forget to reply. It gets buried under the emails from the next day or two, and the next thing you know, I never even see it again (until days like today when I realize my email is out of control). So I’m trying to come up with a better system.

My two spam filters were starting to fall down on me a bit, so I finally bit the bullet and stop forwarding every email to any of my domains to my inbox. The big problem here wasn’t spam, it was bounced messages. Spammers and viruses are always appending random email addresses to my domain names, those emails are being rejected by the receivers’ email server, and my inbox fills with bounce messages. No longer. I’m diverting all that stuff to a separate mail box, and once I can make sure I’m not missing important stuff, it’s going to /dev/null.

The other change is that I’m diverting the email addresses where I usually get feedback from readers to Gmail, which I’m generally better at keeping a handle on. We’ll see how that goes. I think that next week I’m going to upgrade my SpamAssassin install to version 3.0. In any case, with these changes, hopefully I can be better about getting back to people who I should get back to. And I apologize to anyone who I’ve slighted over the past year or so.