[MlMt] Please help me with my broken email workflow

[Jonas Kemper]

Hi all,

because I have carried on old habits for too long and did never really overthink what I'm doing, my email workflow is now very broken.

I use Mailmate with 9 (almost exclusively IMAP) accounts. Five of them are gmail.

I have a smart mailbox called "newsletter/groups/other" with circa 100 conditions (most of them "any adress contains"). These are all the mails I do not want to interrupt me. A second smart Mailbox "ACT!" has only two conditions: in Inbox and not in "newsletter/groups/other". I only get notifications (sound and menubar) about new Mails in "ACT!".

Whenever I work through my Inbox, I either delete messages or press "Archive" for messages that I want to act upon but not right now. Then, usually right afterwards, I work through the messages in Archive and act upon them. Then I delete also those messages.


Problems:

- Both Archive and Delete are not the right choices here. First of all, I almost never want to delete messages. I want to have all messages searchable via the gmail webinterface - in case I need something. It has just proven to be reliable with this.

- Second, I failed over and over again to integrate my iPhone in the process. I would like to do some of the stuff (especially the "deleting and archiving" part) while commuting. Whatever I tried (Mail app, gmail app, ...) did not really map on what I was doing in Mailmate.

- Third, I don't get spam filters. I was never bothered too much by spam - at least not compared to how much false positives have bothered me. Therefore I set up a rule in the gmail webinterface (in:spam -> never flag as spam). This used to work but appears to not work anymore. Then, also Mailmate seems to have some spam fighting logic in it? I want to have control about that kind of stuff but I don't even understand it ...


Ideas:

- One idea I had for a while was to just forward all accounts to a single gmail adress. I could then implement my "newsletter/groups/other" conditions as server-side filters. In Mailmate (and probably on the phone) I would then use the "Archive" button whenever I used to delete messages. I would lose my beloved "act upon but not right now" functionality.


Nice to have features:

- Have everything prepared to switch the gmail accounts to a self hosted or more trustworthy, no-bullshit mail server.


Please, email-pros, give me a few hints to get me back on track or point me to manuals/whatever that tell me how email (and in particular IMAP) is supposed to be used. I want a better email life.

Thank you for your time,
Jonas
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