email identity crisis

[lists at woburn.dyndns.org (Peter R. Wood - Lists)]

Hello fellow emailers,

For years now, I've been living with an email identity crisis.

I have a surplus of email accounts in various places: three different
accounts at my alma mater, two free webmail accounts, three accounts on
open-source community boxes, a mediaone.net account, an account at my
webhost, two accounts on my home linux box, and even an account for my pager.
Yes, I'm quite certain that many of you have even more email accounts laying
around than this, and maybe my problem isn't as big as it seems, but it does
feel that way. Anyway.

I go back and forth with methods for keeping track of it all: at some points,
I didn't forward any of my email accounts, but instead used fetchmail to
periodically poll them. At other times, I forwarded all of my email accounts
to one address, and then pulled from that one. Sometimes I would pull the
mail to a linux box and read it with pine or mutt. Other times I would pull
it to a MacOS box and read it with Outlook. And I've tried nearly everything
in between.

Realistically, there are perhaps four accounts at which I receive email with
any regularity, but there is always that slim possibility in the back of my
head that maybe, just maybe, someone will try to reach me at a not-so-current
address.

So I'm asking you on the BLU list: How do you manage your email? Where do you store it,
how do you read it, where do you have email sent to, etc? My hope is that
through hearing some other folks techniques, I might be able to develop a
*sane* solution for reading and responding to my email.

One small note - my work-related email doesn't figure into this equation...
I've done a very good job of keeping it for use only in work-related matters,
and I only check my work email from work, so that issue is solved for me. :-)

Thanks,

Peter
-- 
Peter R. Wood (Lists) - lists at woburn.dyndns.org - http://prwdot.org/