OT: RE: My correct email address...

[Bruce Easton]

John Esak wrote Monday, November 16, 2009 11:31 AM:
[..] 
> I have a kind of double access to the list as john at valar.com 
> and also john.esak at 21appr.com.  If you are writing to me, 
> please use the john at valar.com.  The 21appr.com will still 
> work, but I ought to straighten it out with Bill or Mark to 
> use one or the other. It should be the john at valar.com.  I'll 
> write to the list runners and get that fixed.  It has just 
> been impossible to keep straight whether I'm replying or 
> writing from my office machine or my home machine.  How does 
> everyone else keep it straight?  
[..]  
> Does everyone just subscribe as a home and work 
> email account, and *remember* to reply with the correct account?
> 
> In other words, the list sends you an email to fred at buck.com, 
> but you also work for united_figs, which has an address of 
> fred at united_figs.com.  Outlook has two separate accounts, 
> "buck" and "figs".  If you're like me, you have Outlook 
> retreive the mail from each account one after the other.  You 
> dump all incoming mail to your business address into a folder 
> called WORK, so that's simple. But, email retrieved for the 
> personal account say like mail from the fplist goes into a 
> FILEPRO folder. Whether you are reading and replying in the 
> WORK folder or the FILEPRO folder, you must do it as one or 
> the other main accounts, and if you want to reply as the 
> "other" account, you have to remember to manually do it.  Is 
> this the pain everyone goes through?
> 
[..]
> 
> John
> 

Coordinating main office and home office email has only recently 
been a challenge for me as a result of more and more time spent 
working from home.  For a period of time, I was a bit frustrated 
about not having a copy of an email here or there, and about 
having to delete all the same spam in both places.

I'm certainly no email expert nor Outlook expert, but one thing 
I will say is that things got a lot better once I had upgraded 
both sites to Office 2003 from whatever it was before, made 
some setting changes and rules in Outlook and just got more 
organized.

I'm note sure what could be set in Outlook that would make 
replying for me different than what you are describing, but 
here are some of the things I have set in my Outlook.  First 
of all, I am pulling the office email from the company's 
mail gateway with POP and outgoing as SMTP.  I'm pretty 
sure that this is the same on the box at the main office.
And Outlook is also set up here to pull my personal email 
via Comcast in the same way.  I don't use any spam program 
to filter anything.  I used to use some different ones, but 
once I upgraded to the Office 2003, I found that I no longer 
needed them.

One thing that is different between to settings for the two 
accounts is that for the company account, under the More Settings, 
Advanced tab, I have checked "Leave a Copy on Server' and 
Remove After 5 days and Remove if Deleted is also checked.
The effect this has is that Outlook will only download the 
email once on each box, will leave a copy on the mail gateway 
box where I can view via the web if need be, and will delete 
from the server if I delete the email keeping it from having 
to be downloaded at the other location (exactly what I need).
(So on the now rather infrequent times that I go into the 
main office and open my email--it now will just pull 
recent email even though I may not have been there in 
several days.  The settings are the same there.)

For replies, it just sets how it will be sent based on which 
of my accounts it was sent to.  I've check all my options and 
settings and I don't see where you can change something to 
affect this behavior.  I'm not sure, but I think this was 
not this straightforward before Office 2003.  For instance 
for this reply above the header there is a gray block that 
says "This message will be sent via mailgate.stn.com."  It 
does that automatically, but I can still pull down the "Accounts"
button above that to send it via another account if I want.

Lastly, under Options, Preferences, Junk Email, I do have 
Safe Lists Only selected along with a bunch of rules 
to allow mail from select people and to get the allowed 
email (individual clients, vendors, friends & family) to go into 
the appropriate folders.  I get more spam thru the 
main office account and more of the tricky type, so I set 
up a rule in Outlook that if an email is both from and to 
my office email address and does not contain a key expression 
in the body, then it will go to the Junk folder.  That gets 
rid of all the spam mail where it looks like I sent it 
to myself.  On an average day now once email has been 
downloaded, it will show a few unread messages in the 
various folders and a hundred or so new entries in the 
junk mail folder.  I do browse that, but rarely find 
anything that should not be deleted.  As I said the company 
email does come through the mail gateway.  But outside of 
anti-virus on the PCs, I don't have any special email 
cop program anymore.

Bruce