Filtering and Sandbox for Mobile Email

In addition to providing convenient access to all your messages, an account dedicated to aggregating your email can make mobile email management a lot easier than before. Here are some use cases for a dedicated mobile email account:

Filtering
We typically do not need to read all messages on our phone. For instance, one of my email accounts receives an alert message from every post to a discussion forum I monitor; another account is subscribed to a high-volume mailing list. I certainly do not want to read these messages while I am on the go. You can set up the aggregation account to aggregate only certain messages, and to filter out some messages for later processing when you are in front of a desktop computer.

Sandbox
Multiple email clients from phones and desktop computers create message management issues. In particular, as I discussed earlier, if you delete a message from your phone, the desktop client cannot recover it or archive it later. You can use the mobile email aggregation account as an email "sandbox." You can download, view, and delete any message in the mobile account from your phone. The regular accounts still keep all your messages when you are home, where you can download the messages via your primary email client.

When you send or reply to a message from your phone, it is a good idea to Cc yourself so that your desktop computer has a record of it later.

Ideally, the mobile email aggregation account should be a standard user account on a Unix/Linux server, with basic support for POP and SMTP. Most Unix/Linux-based ISPs or web hosts provide such services.