Take total control of your email with Highrise and RSS

Even after shifting to Gmail and escaping from the grips of the spammers thanks to it’s impressive filters I still have an email problem.

My voluminous amounts of email can be split into two groups. The first group is email from people who are important to me and whose emails I want to be notified of as soon as possible. The second group is all the other email that does not need to be reported to me straight away.

It’s easy to set up a filter to divert the emails from the first group of people to a separate folder in Gmail but it still means I will be distracted by the other emails in the inbox. Ideally I would like to check for email from some people without checking for email from everyone. I don’t want to check all my email at the same time. I would like to check my email inbox once a day but still be notified immediately of any emails from certain people.

With a Gmail account, a free Highrise account and an RSS reader my problem is solved.

Highrise is an online contact manager from the clever people at 37 Signals. There is a free version which allows you to track up to 250 contacts. Highrise has a clever system that allows you to forward any email to your account and have it automatically added to a contact’s page. It also provides you with an RSS feed that you can subscribe to which notifies you of any changes. This means that any emails forwarded to your Highrise account will be correctly allocated to a contact page and be picked up by your RSS reader.

The first step is to set up forwarding filters in Gmail to forward all email from your most important contacts to your Highrise account. If no contact exists for a given email address Highrise automatically creates new contact profiles from the data in the email it receives. Everything is taken care of for you. Sounds too good to be true but it really is like having an automatic contact manager.

The second step is simply to subscribe to your Highrise RSS feed in the feed reader of your choice and set it to check the feed at frequent and regular intervals.

That’s all there is to it. Now all your important email will be filed away in your Highrise account and you will be notified through your RSS reader. Keep your feed reader open all day and check your other email, either in your mail application or via Gmail once a day. Problem solved.

Highrise has a lot more tricks up its sleeves and I have only scratched the surface of its potential here. However, this method of routing my important email through Highrise and out through an RSS feed has already changed the way I communicate online. It returns some of the control in managing email to me and having my important emails stored in such an intelligent way online is incredibly useful.