I wrote recently on my Almerimar Life site about a de cluttering project that we had started. This was (and is) aimed very much at the physical side of life; the vast amounts of stuff we have accumulated over the years but either due to changes in lifestyle, or technological advancements, just isn’t really needed any longer:

• The 10 piece dinner service when we last had a ‘dinner party’ 10 years ago!
• The 8 mobile phones that I have, as well as the N95 8GB and the iPhone that I use
• The 14 baseball caps ….

I went through a similar exrecise a while ago sticking all the music and DVD’s onto the Mac and getting rid of the originals, and I have slowly deleted and archived unused files off the various Mac’s over recent years.

Recently though I had to tackle an issue that has long been an achilles heel of mine ………. email accounts! I have always tended to have email accounts for each domain I own, and more often than not for specific projects as well. Then there are the client email accounts, and the numerous gmail ones that have been used over the years to sign up to newsletters, forums etc. All in all I must have had 30 at any one time, and a forwarding system that would have done a PhD proud!!!

Well recently my server (Media Temple dv) has been going somewhat ballistic with numerous numfiles Black Zones bringing things to a halt every 10 mins or so. One culprit appeared to be IMAP, and although there are some settings that can be jiggled with, the net result was that it was sensible (and necessary) to prune the number of email accounts. I say prune, when in reality what I should probably say is wholesale destruction LOL!

I now have 3 accounts set up in Mail. An associated issue with the above problem was that I was finding that I had too many smtp servers set up in Mail, and for some weird reason @me.com was very unreliable. I now have a @me.com, @almerimarlife.com and @gmail account set up, so I collect emails off, and send through, 3 separate servers. This has significantly improved the performance of @me.com and reduced the load on my server considerably.

I still have about 12 email accounts set up, but with a pretty simple forwarding structure:

– all gmail accounts forwarded to one gmail account
– anything to do with @almerimarlife.com forwarded to that email
– everything else forwraded to @me.com

Now I suspect that in due course the @me.com account will get filled up, which will either require a ‘seek and destroy’ mission, or a re think, but as I have also unsubscribed to a lot of newsletters and alerts (I no longer get any alerts from Twitter for example which has reduced the flow of incoming emails an unbelievable amount), it is as quiet now on the email front as it ever has been ….. in fact I am starting to wonder if I have messed up by delete/forward strategy and have emails floating in the ether somewhere, but heh, if that is the case I am sure people will figure that out and find a way to get hold of me!

And you know how it is when you get started on something …….. well I took the digitail pruning clippers to my Skype, Adium and iChat accounst as well, and removed pretty much anyone that I hadn’t communicated with within a month! I didn’t block anyone so people ca still contact me, but as we hadn’t communicated in at least a month I doubt too many people will even notice I have gone!