Like most people, I get waaaaaay too much e-mail. Between some crazy deadlines, out-of-town conferences and wiping out my primary desktop machine, I’ve been offline for a couple of weeks and boy-oh-boy have the messages piled up. [If you’re waiting for a reply from me on something, I promise I haven’t forgotten you. 🙂 I’m still re-installing and it’s going to take me a few more days to dig my way out.]

While I don’t subscribe to nearly as many newsletters as I used to — most of my news-ish stuff comes in the form of RSS feeds these days — I still subscribe to a few. Here are some tips if you’re writing a newsletter that will decrease the odds that I’ll delete it without reading it:

• Don’t change your “from” address. I white-list only those newsletters I want. If you change your address without telling me first, your newsletter will be deleted as spam and I won’t even know it.
• If you must change your e-mail address, tell me before you change it. Sending me a “we’ve changed our address” message from your new address is an instant FAIL. I’ll miss it because your new address isn’t white-listed. I can’t believe how many people don’t think about this one.
• A unique per-user ID in the subject line helps me tell your newsletter apart from phishes that look just like it. If I get too many phishes impersonating your newsletter, I’ll probably just unsubscribe it. I know it’s not your fault, but I don’t have the time to spend sorting out the fakes. A unique per-user ID in the subject is a very fast, easy way to make it obvious which messages are probably real and which are almost certainly fake.

Outlook 2007 has a very cool feature that lets you embed your current calendar in an e-mail and send it someone else. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could e-mail your To-Do list as well? Now you can! This macro shows you how to generate a formatted e-mail that contains all of your current tasks, as well as a list of any messages that you’ve flagged for follow-up.

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For longer than I can remember, I have been on a quest for a good e-mail client. I need something fast, reliable and–this is where everything falls apart–able to handle at least 10,000 e-mails in a single folder quickly with complex automatic filtering. Some of my support mailboxes receive many thousands of messages in a single day. Ideally I’d also like an integrated calendar, to-do list and a pretty UI.

I was beginning to suspect that I had tried every known e-mail client on planet earth, when today I ran across one I hadn’t tried before. Without really reading what it was other than “e-mail client I haven’t tried” I eagerly downloaded it. To my surprise, this is what I saw when I ran it:

Yes, the readme did say “LCARS interface” before I downloaded it, but somehow I didn’t put two-and-two together.

Now that wasn’t what I was expecting! Unfortunately, it doesn’t support IMAP. 🙂