Most of My Books' Material Doesn't Depend On Your Email Program
Each of my books has 11 chapters, only three of which depend
heavily on your email program.
Chapters 2 and 3 cover what may be the most important part of my books:
how to set up filters to automatically organize and prioritize your messages.
Filters take specified actions based on conditions you set. For
example, you might set up a filter that moves all messages
with "Viagra" in the subject lne to a "Probable Junk" folder.
Chapter 4, Move Around Your Messages Quickly, is highly specific to
what email program you use. It might not help you much, but it's not a critical
chapter. While most chapters tell you how to be more effective by
doing different things, this chapter tells you how to be more efficient
by doing the same things better.
The other chapters -- on how to reduce the amount of mail you get, spend less
time on responses, write better (and hence get better) messages, and
improve your organization -- have only bits and pieces here and there that
are specific to your email program.
You Can Use Claris Emailer (Mac) or Netscape 6.1+
Bad news: AOL doesn't have filters at all.
Good news:
you can use
Claris
Emailer (Mac OS only, out of print) or
Netscape (version 6.1 or later)
to read your AOL email, and they both
do have good facilities for handling lots of email.
If you are willing to use Netscape 6.1 to read your email,
here's
how to
set it up with AOL;
see also
What if You Use Netscape?
You Might Be Able to Use Eudora
I have heard of software from eNetBot
that will translate from AOL mail to regular POP3 email. (POP3 is the
technical name for the email standard that essentially all programs but
AOL use.) If eNetBot works as claimed, you should be able to use
Eudora, Netscape, Outlook 2002, Outlook 2000, Outlook Express,
or any other POP3-compliant email program.
You're probably thinking to yourself, "Ah, I'll use Outlook Express because
I have it and it's free." Uh, you can do that if you want, but it's free
for a reason -- it doesn't work well for everybody. OE's filters are limited
enough that the only way it can group messages is to move them into different
folders. Unfortunately, many people have trouble keeping track of their
"to-do" messages when they are spread across several folders.
I highly recommend Eudora. It's got oodles and oodles of features and is
really good for people who get lots of email. It has a bunch of features that
you probably won't care about, but if you read
my Eudora book, it will tell you about the features you need while ignoring
the ones you don't need.