WELL I THOUGHT MY EMAIL PROBLEMS WOULD BE BEHIND NOW - BUT NO, NOW I HAVE TO DELETE SOMEWHERE AROUND 90% OF WHAT HAS COME INTO MY COMPUTER

 Sorry about missing last week.   My main computer and email are still not completely back up and running from the email software problems I have been having. I really depend on my computer(s) to stay organized.  

What do YOU do with your email to read and keep track of it?

We did have to delete the software and do a clean install of the new software.  By doing this we then had to do a new setup of all my email accounts.  Okay – you have one or two or three email accounts – but as part of my organizing I have somewhere around 15 accounts.  15 accounts – why?  

Well I have my basic account – my family, husband's family and maybe 3 or 4 close friends have this email address – this way I can respond to the most important people in our lives quickly.  

I have an account for my accounting practice for my clients to contact me.  

One of my business clients – a woman in her 80s who still owns, runs and goes to work at her business every day – does not use a computer.  Her alarm company only bills by email.  So I opened up an account for her business to deal with this.  Before the pandemic when I was going in every month I would print out the bills when they came in, bring them with me to her and write the check for her to pay the company.  Since the pandemic I print the bills and mail them to her to pay as I have not being going to her – she mails me copies of the info I need.  

I have an account for the craft business which husband and I have for matters related to the business.

I have an account for my cell phone so it works.

I have an account for my embroidery club – it is used for things related to the club and me.  I have a second account for this club – but this account I have as the treasurer of the club – when I am no longer treasurer the new treasurer will get this account and have records of what the old treasurer (me) sent out, received, and did.  

I have an account for our reenactment unit – it used, for things related to the unit and me.  I also, again, have a second account for the unit as I am, again, treasurer of it.  (When one is an accountant one always ends up being the treasurer.)  This is used for business of the unit and will, again, be passed along to the next treasurer at some point.

I have an email account for this blog – any of you who want to me contact – feel free to do using the blog's email address.

I have 2 email accounts which I use when doing things online – such as various online groups/sites I belong to.  

I have 2 email accounts which were used with other clubs I used to belong to and I have kept for when I send an email and not be known.  

I also have one email account which has a different start to it as when I give the email address by telephone (something I used to do often when making hotel reservations back at the end of 20th century) my normal format has an “f” in it which people hear when talk as “s”, so when I need to give my email address by telephone I use this address as it does not have that problem.

My poor husband sat for 2 days entering all of these accounts into the new software and making sure they work properly.
Biggest problem is that when we talked about wiping out the old program and installing the new I asked him if this would result in just the unread emails being brought into the computer or all of the ones in the accounts.  He assured that only the unread emails would be brought into my computer/the software.  Wrong guess – one email address brought in something like 32,000 emails!!  (And that is one of my junk accounts.) While I might like to have them in my computer I don't NEED emails from 2018 – or more importantly don't even WANT emails from 2008!  

So I spend a good part of every day going through the email accounts in the software and deleting old emails – by the single email or more generally by the page.  I also have to sort some of the ones I am keeping into special folders to be able some emails more easily (such as the emails from USPS telling me what mail was to be delivered to me each day – if you haven't signed up for this service, it is very good to have).  When deleting emails – even single ones – they take quite awhile to be deleted which is annoying and slows the process down.  I figure this could take a month or two or more to finish doing.

I have also found that some – not a lot, but some – emails came through scrambled or unformatted and in at least one case the name in the list does not match the text in the email – it being one of the ones from USPS by title, but not the text in it.  

In addition we made the changeover just before I was due to email out the monthly newsletter for my embroidery club.  I had finished the newsletter just before husband started dealing with all of this – it was written and saved in a text processing program so what I had written was not affected by all of this.  I went to last month's newsletter and copied the list of who it was sent to and pasted that into the email for this newsletter.  Instead of showing the showing the emails it only showed the member's names!  I could not send it out using the information from last month's newsletter.  I hate to push my work off onto someone else – but had to as it serves as the meeting reminder and I wanted it out a month before the meeting – so I sent it the club president (who knew I was having email problems) and asked her to send it out for me.  I send out 2 other copies – one to those who asked about our club and one to certain people in the region management who I am required to send it to.   Those went out a couple of days after I hand copied their information into new address books in the new program.  I have been told that there was problem with this – attached files (including the newsletter) cannot be opened as before – they have to be copied first.  

Throw into all of this – husband set up the program to automatically download emails when I sign on.  At some point I have this changed to wait until I check for emails as if I sign after having checked emails for the day earlier in the day – it will download any new ones when I do not generally want them as if I am back in the account it generally means I need information from something I have already read.  The other problem with this is if I do need to check for email again in ONE account – all of them are downloading any email which has come in.  

THOUGHT OF THE WEEK -
This will be an ongoing project for some time.  There is nothing else I can do to get it all cleaned up.  I am trying to do it logical way – in my case I started with the first email account in the list – not the most important one.  I figure if I have all my emails from the start of 2022 in my computer I can always refer to older ones in my online account if needed.  Only somewhere around 40,000 emails left to sort through!

What do YOU do with your email to read and keep track of it – no really, I am curious what other people do?