Alternatives to Outlook for your Personal Mail

You may get the impression from some of my posts, such as this one, that I like to be well connected, and ‘always on’. That’s true, to a point. I think these days, being able to access your corporate mail whenever & wherever is being seen as increasingly useful, and often a necessary part of a role – but it needn’t take over your life. For example; yes – I have my corporate email on my phone, but have all email notifications (except calendar notifications) turned off – I have to ‘want’ to check my mail.

Likewise, on my laptop, I have Outlook configured to my corporate account. But, I don’t actually use this for my personal email accounts. This was again fairly intentional – I have to want to check my mails by opening up Outlook (yeah, ok – it’s open 99% of the time, but I’m less likely to check it)

So what do I use instead? I actually use a useful application called PostBox. It has a fairly clean & simple interface (I love Outlook, but find it overkill for most of my junk!), can handle multiple accounts easily (I use 1 primary personal account, a site related account and a separate junk account for signing up for things I think may end up in a lot of spam!), and integrates well with Gmail Labels.

I also have it hooked up to various RSS feeds, though find there are some improvements which could be made here – but it works well enough.

Also has useful features like pre-canned responses & integration with Dropbox & Social Media sites

Overall, a useful program – well worth the $10 I think I paid for it

Postbox-inc.com