I have had several clients and colleagues ask me to share with them how I cut the cord to Outlook and moved all my mail to the Cloud. It is not complicated, but here are the steps I personally used to move all my mail online.
First, understand that I am/was an avid Outlook user and have over 15 email accounts feeding into Outlook. I lived by my Outlook calendar ; if it was not there I did not do it. I have used Outlook for years and leaned heavily on it for work productivity and work flow. However, I hated to travel as when I got back the email level was so high. To alleviate this I even bought a subscription for GoToMyPC so I could use Outlook while away from the office. And I even bought CompanionLink to sync my Google calendar to Outlook. I did not want to use Google Apps or Office 365 as I simply did not want to pay the subscription charges or let Google or Microsoft get their “hooks” into my work processes and domain name records.
To get ready for the move I really looked carefully at my existing email accounts. What was important and what was not. I still wanted to see all the emails but needed greater Cloud control so my inbox would not be stacked. Then I used accounts I already had created. Here’s what I did.
My most important email accounts, I had three, I forwarded in my hosting control panel to my Gmail account. Then I set up Gmail to send mail as my primary email account nancy@mccordweb.com. This email account is all business. I do not have any personal accounts pointing to this account.
I then set up an Outlook.com email account. To this account I forwarded all email accounts that were important but not as important. I have about 6 accounts feeding into this one email address. I set up rules in Outlook.com to send the messages I receive from one address that are crucial, but create a ton of traffic into one folder. I have an MSN account, a Verizon account and a number of mccordweb.com email accounts all forwarding to this account. However nearly all my daily email actively arriving in this account is personally related. This is also the email that I use for family and my bank. I set this account up to allow me to send email from a personal Verizon address or my Outlook.com address.
I then set up a Yahoo.com email account. To this account I fowarded all email accounts that were not important, but necessary. I have many smaller less frequent emails sent here but I only check this account once or twice a week.
On my smartphone I have an app for each one of these different mail platforms on my home screen; Gmail, Outlook.com, and Yahoo Mail. I have set up different sounds for notification so that when I hear a sound I know which email account a message has arrived for. This cues me as to is the mail personal or business. I turned off sync on the Yahoo account to save my phone battery and I only have this mail on for my smartphone when I really want it or am traveling.
Check back on Wednesday for my next tips on how to really make email in the Cloud work for you.
This first step covered today is really about getting ready to transition and organizing your email accounts into online accounts.
You may have additional prep organization on your end as to changing services that send mail to which account to control what goes where. For me, we webmaster a number of blogs and I took time to point the WordPress control panel notifications to a different email address than my primary business address to further control what arrived in what Cloud email account based on my setup.