Email (Re)Consolidation (Premium)

In 2018, Google announced that it was killing Inbox, my preferred email service. This triggered a major rethinking of the way that I handle email across multiple accounts, and I learned two things immediately: I would not be using Gmail (on the web) because it had become just as convoluted as Outlook (on the web), and my previous method of consolidating multiple accounts so that all emails were delivered and managed through Inbox was resulting in me losing some emails, most likely because of multiple layers of spam protection.

I tried all kinds of options, first experimenting with Outlook.com (on the web) and Outlook Mobile. I tried Outlook for Windows for the umpteenth time, but it’s a horrible client for Google services. I tried Gmail and various third-party clients. I even looked at Windows Mail, which is a sad joke and remains so today.

And eventually, I settled on the system I’m still using today: Gmail on the web with the Simplify extension to make it more like Inbox and Outlook Mobile on my handsets, where I consolidate multiple accounts at the local level (as opposed to doing so in the cloud, and thus globally).

Gmail with Simplify isn’t ideal, but it’s better than plain Gmail. The issue, alas, is my approach to mobile. And as it turns out, I’m still missing emails. But this time, it’s all my fault. And that means I need to make a change. Again.

Here’s what’s happening.

One of the complications of my job is that I move from device to device on a regular basis. This is true with laptops, where it seems I get 2-3 review laptops each month and struggle to keep up with the review. And it’s true on mobile, where I review probably half a dozen smartphones or more each year.

It’s a bit easier keeping up with the mobile reviews because there are fewer devices to worry about. But because I’m reviewing these handsets, I always configure each as a new device and don’t restore from backups as many consumers would likely do.

Aside from the obvious issues with doing things this way---bringing a phone up to where it’s fully configured with all my accounts, apps, and content takes the better part of a day---this way of doing things introduces another problem: I don’t always remember to configure all of my email accounts in Outlook Mobile. And so I sometimes go weeks and months without checking some of my secondary accounts. And I miss things.

As I’ve described in the distant past, there are basically two ways to consolidate email accounts. You can do so in the cloud, where you forward email from secondary accounts to the main account and then configure that main account to be able to send mail from each of the secondary accounts as well. Or you can consolidate them at the client level, where email from multiple accounts appears in a single, consolidated inbox view.

Through 2018, I had been using the former method. But while experimenting with a replacement for Inbox, I discovered that I was ...