I recently moved email hosting for my custom domains from Zoho to MXRoute, choosing the latter mostly because of its simplicity. Whereas Zoho is an ersatz Microsoft Office, MXRoute is a very focused, almost low brow service focused purely on email management. That transition was pretty smooth thanks to IMAPSync (much easier than manually forwarding emails from one account to another, which is how I moved to Zoho in the first place) and MXRoute's excellent documentation.
More problematic was trying to move myself from individual webmail sites to a central mail application. As of now, I have the following mail services:
- Gmail
- Microsoft
- MXRoute
- iMail
…each with multiple accounts, aliases and forwarders. Thinking it would be somehow simpler, I naively decided to load the Microsoft, MXRoute, and Gmail accounts into Thunderbird and the iOS Mail app.
Now, I have experience entering IMAP credentials into different apps, including Thunderbird and Mail, but previously I used them to read my over-burdened-by-spam Gmail account or delete messages from my custom domain accounts. What I had forgotten over the past year is what a mess the "Archive" function of most modern mail apps/sites makes of things.
It varies from service to service, but the idea of the Archive folder/mailbox is similar to what Microsoft proposes in their (genuinely helpful) Outlook best practices as a "Reference" folder:
A single reference folder, under the Inbox, for all reference material that you might want to refer back to later. Nothing is automatically filed (that is, with a rule) into this folder. Name this folder 1-Reference. (Adding the 1- will cause it to be the first item under the Inbox.) This folder is created under the Inbox so that you can collapse the Inbox and remove it from view.
I use this approach at work and it helps keep me from getting distracted by a cluttered inbox (mine is around 10 messages at the moment) and prevents the cognitive burden of correctly sorting a "finished" message into the right sub-folder. I instead rely on Outlook's search tools, which are far from perfect but good enough to find a message about X sent by Y.
I use Archive frequently, but, as I said, every app seems to implement this feature slightly differently (by default). Upon archiving your first email:
- Thunderbird creates a new Archives folder with year-specific sub-folders that it shunts the archived email into.
- iOS Mail creates a new Archive folder and assigns it as the "Archive Mailbox".
- Outlook similarly creates a new Archive folder but at least names it explicitly as a "folder" instead of treating it as a separate "mailbox".
- Gmail chooses to be a special little treasure and uses an "All Mail" folder as the "Archive" folder.
What makes this difficult is that each service seems to take its special action regardless of what (if any) folders named "Archive" already exist. Also, to get other applications to see the special Archive folder other apps created, you may need to "subscribe" to that folder in the webmail client for the account/server (which I had to do for MXRoute before Thunderbird would see the iOS Mail Archive folder).
What a mess!