I truly am a geek. I am working on a new taxonomy for my e-mails (all of which I’m moving to Gmail, by the way) and…well, I’m having a really good time planning it all out!

The thing is: I’m a very nested-folders type of person so switching to the labels-and-search model is a little scary. Why is it scary? Because, other than the default folders (inbox, sent mail, etc.), I currently have 172 — yes, that’s one hundred and seventy-two — folders in Thunderbird. And I’m trying to cut that down to about 15.

The reason I can do this (quite easily, in fact) is that most of my existing folders are second-level folders: one for each mailing list that I subscribe to, one for each MBA course that I’m taking, etc. So really I have just 37 top-level folders. Actually, even that’s too many because, back in the day, I gave sites that I’m a paid member of their own top-level folder so those will now go. I also have a couple of temporary folders in there. I’ve been meaning to do a good folders rationalization for a couple of years now but I’ve just never gotten around to it. I guess this is my chance.

The good thing — which is making this move much less scary — is that, having used Google Web Search and Desktop Search for years now, I’m pretty confident that, even with 15 folders instead of 172, finding old e-mails shouldn’t be much of a problem.

The New Taxonomy

The key change I’m making to the taxonomy is that my labels will not be about who the e-mails are from — the taxonomy I’ve been following since the mid-90s that has served me well — but what the e-mails are about – the taxonomy I started to move to a few years ago (and which, obviously, I use for my blogs).

This lends itself well to the whole labels concept because an e-mail can be about more than one subject. So, for example, an e-mail sent from my sister about an Internet meme will get the ‘Funny & Forwards’ label. However, if she also wrote some family stuff in that e-mail, I’ll also attach the ‘Family & Friends’ label to it. Neat, huh?

The challenge, of course, is in coming up with those few, most useful labels. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

1. Friends & Family — e-mails about (you guessed it) friends and family
2. Funny & Forwards — jokes, forwards, memes, etc.
3. Life Admin — e-mails from banks, utilities, ISPs, etc.
4. Lists & Sites – e-mails from mailing lists and sites I am a member of
5. LUMS — old e-mails from my undergrad days as well as current alumni-related e-mails
6. MBS — all course, admin, alumni, etc. e-mails
7. Music — old and, in the future, new band-related e-mails
8. Nadia — a whole separate label for my wife since she is, after all, more than just a friend or family member
9. Saved Stuff — stuff I want to keep for future reference that is not a funny or a forward (i.e. articles and the like)
10. Sites & Projects — stuff about non-work websites I maintain or about various projects that come up
11. Temp Bukkit — e-mails that I’ll catch up on the weekend but want out of my inbox for now
12. Work — all work-related e-mail (I presume I’ll be maintaining another taxonomy in my work e-mail account)

Just twelve?! Not bad, eh? :)

Of course, as with any taxonomy, I expect this one to evolve over time. So far, though, I think it’s an accurate representation of all the e-mails I currently have in Thunderbird. And if it isn’t, I’ll probably tweak it as I upload my e-mail to Gmail (either that or I’ll delete the e-mails instead!). Meanwhile, I’m quite pleased with this list. Now…let the uploading begin!

For the two people who read this blog: what taxonomy do you use for your e-mails?

I have three primary e-mail accounts: Melbourne Business School, Yahoo! Mail Plus, and insanityWORKS.org. I also have three secondary ones: The University of Melbourne, Gmail, and Hotmail. I forward UniMelb to MBS, Gmail to Yahoo!, and I check Hotmail via a browser periodically. I POP mail from my primary accounts to my laptop and I use Mozilla Thunderbird as my e-mail client. That is:

When I’m away from my laptop, however, I usually only check my primary accounts. To do that, I use the MBS webmail interface, Yahoo!’s excellent webmail interface, and I POP my insanityWORKS mail into Yahoo!. That is:

This system has worked well for the last seven years because I’ve always had one primary computer to work on (which, for the last four years, has been my laptop). Now things are starting to change and I’m tempted to (a) move all my e-mail online and (b) move to one primary e-mail account (Gmail) and five secondary ones (all the rest). That is:

Here’s why…

Three Major Changes

First, I’ve become a lot more mobile and I increasingly want access to all my old e-mails (and some of my data) regardless of where I am and which computer I’m working on. This wouldn’t be a problem if I was to carry my laptop (and, therefore, all my e-mail and data) with me everywhere I went, but that’s not something I want to do all the time. Also, in the future I want to use my phone to access my e-mail and I simply can’t do that with my current setup.

Second, cloud computing has come a long way over the last couple of years and Yahoo!, which is by far my preferred e-mail provider, lacks a number of cloud computing features that I really want. For example, Google Reader is much better than Yahoo!’s RSS reader and Microsoft’s SkyDrive is much better than Yahoo! Briefcase. I also prefer Google’s Calendar to Yahoo!’s, I really like Gmail’s labelling mechanism, and Microsoft’s Live Mesh sounds very exciting as well. In other words, I want to start using cloud computing-like services and Yahoo! alone isn’t giving them to me.

Third, we live in an increasingly connected world. My current system of downloading all my e-mail to my laptop works well because it assumes that I’ll be doing a lot of e-mailing (and, in general, computing) offline and from one computer. Increasingly, that is not the case. Instead, I now use communication tools like Facebook and Twitter for which you need to be constantly online, I don’t limit my e-mail usage to just my laptop, and I even access the ‘net and my e-mail through my mobile phone (though I don’t do much of that right now because it’s really expensive on my current phone plan!).

Two Implications

This means two things. First, I am seriously considering moving all my e-mail to the ‘cloud’. I want this for seamless and synchronized e-mail access across multiple computers and devices. And since I am frequently online (or at least in mobile phone signal range) not being able to access my e-mail because I don’t have an Internet (or mobile phone) connection is no longer an issue.

For this to work, though, I will need an IMAP-based e-mail solution and not a POP-based one. IMAP will not only let me sync my e-mail across multiple computers and devices, it will let me work offline (before re-syncing) as well. 

Second, because of that IMAP requirement, I am seriously considering making Gmail my sole primary e-mail account. In fact, I’ll start to POP e-mail from all my other accounts into this one as well (see diagram above).

Why? Not only is Gmail the only one that offers IMAP (which is why it should be my only e-mail interface), it’s free and it gives me tonnes of storage, great calendar integration, and excellent e-mail search capabilities. It is also reliable, universally accessible, and, once I switch, I won’t have to take regular backups of my e-mail folders any more.

I could, of course, use other (paid) IMAP services, but I think I’d be better off using Gmail for all the additional benefits I get from it.

One Decision

So I have a big decision to make. Do I move all 2.1GB of e-mail archives off my laptop, out of my direct control, and into the cloud? Some people have done that and are happy with it. Others didn’t have such a great time. Until I try it myself, I don’t know how things will turn out for me. What might be useful, though, is if I was to do a bit of e-mail housekeeping before uploading everything to Gmail. Doing that would be a pain up-front, but it would make life a lot easier going forward.

Actually, maybe the bigger issue is this: should I commit myself to using only Gmail (via IMAP) from this point on? I guess another way to think of this is to ask myself whether this is better than the status quo. That is: should I commit myself to using only my laptop (with occasional backups) to store all my e-mail? Or, to get the best of both worlds, does it make more sense to store my e-mail both on Gmail and to maintain a local copy of all that e-mail in Thunderbird as well? The answer, in theory, is pretty obvious. Naturally, it’s much harder to go ahead and actually implement the solution.

I think I’ll start off with a baby step: I’ll activate IMAP on my Gmail account and will start using that with Thunderbird. I’ll even try uploading copies of some of my old e-mails into Gmail to see how it goes. If that goes well, I’ll spend the next few weeks moving all my folders over one-by-one. Before I know it, I’ll be good to go. Let’s just hope things go as smoothly as I’ve just made them sound!

Want a deeper and most awesome analysis of the recent WGA strike? Read Matt Prager’s essay on Lawrence Lessig’s blog.

Or is it a debacle only when, say, Microsoft does it but a minor PR issue when Apple does it? Whatever.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while now, but haven’t gotten around to it (the last week of my MBA starts today! Yaay!). Meanwhile, Paul Thurrott’s gone and said pretty much what I wanted to say in his article: Apple lofts middle finger at PC users, PC users thank Apple for acknowledging them. Of course, he says it much better than I ever could (and with a lot more authority, being a tech journalist and all) but that’s okay.

I watched The Spiderwick Chronicles today. And while the movie was pretty good, I was most impressed by actor Freddie Highmore who played the twins Jared and Simon. (Sarah Bolger, who played their sister Mallory was also pretty good).

Highmore’s done a lot of other cool stuff as well. For example, he played Charlie in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and was the voice of Pantalaimon in The Golden Compass. He’ll also be doing the voice for Astro Boy (slated for a 2009 release).

Chalk up one more young actor whose career I am looking forward to following (the other one being Dakota Fanning). Hmmm…I must now watch August Rush.

Crave has a great article on the Anatomy of an IKEA Product. Fascinating stuff.

Almost missed this: Nadia’s Token Human rant was featured in Heartless Bitches :) Awesome.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Peter Gabriel recently so, while surfing through PG-related stuff on the ‘net, I came across Brigitte Jellinek’s Comments on Peter Gabriel Songs site. The title pretty much sums-up what the site is about and, if you’re a big PG fan, it’s definitely worth a visit.

PC Magazine has finally gotten around to reviewing the Toshiba M700 tablet PC. Cisco Cheng gives is a 4 out of 5 and says:

Bottom Line: This convertible tablet has the processing capability and an optical drive to maintain productivity at a high level.

Pros: Excellent performance scores. Built-in optical drive. Beefed-up hinges. Wacom and touch capabilities. Superb “green” attributes. Comfortable keyboard.

Cons: Needs 3G support. Plain and bulky-looking.

Awesome.

[Via GBM]

During my undergrad I became president of Alpha Hour — LUMS’ extracurricular club that showed movies, invited guest speakers to campus, and arranged discussion groups on interesting topics.

While I was president, though, it ended up being more of a film club than anything else. Every Friday evening, then, I’d borrow the video projector, book the school’s largest auditorium, and screen a couple of films. We’d show all kinds of stuff and, by the time I handed the club over to my juniors, it had become pretty popular.

The movie screening formula that I used also worked nicely: I’d show a popular movie or cartoon first (usually a comedy, romantic comedy, or action movie), take a half hour break, and then show a more serious movie (usually a drama, artsy movie, or cult classic). The first session usually filled the 370-seat auditorium, especially when we showed films like Titanic or Star Wars: Episode I. The second session, meanwhile, was targeted mostly to film buffs and/or hostel residents (I was both). I remember in particular our second-show screening of Apocalypse Now because, by the end of the movie, there were only eight people in the room :)

Coming to the point of this blog post: Having run a film club in the past, it made me really happy, then, when a friend e-mailed to tell me about the Punjnad Film Club that has recently started in Lahore (”alpha hour - all jumped up on volunteer adrenaline”, he wrote). We have a number of cinemas in Lahore but all of them focus on mainstream movies (mostly blockbusters) and PFC is a breath of fresh air for people who want to watch other kinds of movies as well. Here’s hoping they’re wildly successful.