I have two new email habits to report…

Blackberry Sync

So as of last week, I no longer add myself as an invitee on every meeting I add to my webmail calendar in order to get the event to show up on my Blackberry.  Now I use our Blackberry Sync product to keep my Contacts, Calendar and Tasks in sync with the data in my webmail account.  It’s in private beta right now and still has a few kinks to work out, but I already love it.

Filtering after delivery

I got sick of having to read mail twice because my Blackberry doesn’t mark things as read in my webmail account.  This was happening because of the funky multi-mailbox forwarding system I set up to simulate folders on my Blackberry.  Blackberry would check these secondary accounts and mark mail as read in there, but it wouldn’t mark it as read in my primary account.  Over the weekend I ditched those secondary accounts and I deleted all of my filtering rules in webmail.  Now everything comes to my primary inbox and I have Blackberry checking just that account.  When I read something on my Blackberry now it marks it as read in webmail.

But I still love folders.  So to manage my 100+ folders I installed imapfilter on my desktop.  I transfered all of my webmail filter rules into this and I also configured it to not move any mail from my inbox which is flagged or unread.  Throughout the day now, after I’ve caught up with everything in my inbox, I simply press a button in my quicklaunch bar and woosh… all my mail gets filed away into folders.

I expect these two changes to save me at least 20 minutes per
day.  And it will save me even more time when I’m traveling and using my Blackberry as my
primary email client.