EMAIL AND LAWYERS users’ accounts were hacked as far back as 2013.
Back in the 90’ s, I set up my first web site and purchased the melchionne. com domain. An email of gene @ melchionne. com is very memorable. If you can remember my name, you can email me. For a while, internet search engines gave brownie points for having a memorable domain name. Although hat is no longer absolutely true, I purchased ctbankruptcy. com not too long after buying melchionne. com. Since I control the assignment of email addresses at my domains, gene @ ctbankruptcy. com, nacba @ melchionne. com, or gene @ consumerbankruptcytips. com is possible.
Do you live on the corner of Google Street and Yahoo Avenue?( Don’ t Come Around Here No More)
As you can see, I have many email addresses. There are many more than I mentioned here. I have learned to designate specific email addresses for specific purposes. For example, ECF notices go to ECF-only-send-noemail @ ctbankruptcy. com; I have one for the National Data Center which sends notices on my client’ s Chapter 13 accounts with the Trustee so I can monitor their payments. I have one for opposing counsel, one for clients, one for family and several for friends. Multiple email addresses are also useful for tracking purposes. I know where clients come from, because I use unique email addresses on my web sites and other marketing materials.
You might ask, how do I keep them straight? The answer is really simple. Each email account has its own inbox. I set designated times of the day to look at each inbox and deal with the new email in them. From there, I set priorities. I dispatch as many as I can right away. Others are marked for later that day, others are calendared for specific response days and times. You have to decide on a system that works for you. It is easy to get Pavlovian about this. An email comes in and you feel like you must deal with it right away, much like the dogs who drools at the ring of bell.
A note about Gmail and“ cloud” email. I know that a lot of people are heavily invested in the Google Ecosystem. The problem with Gmail as I see it, is that users get used to looking at their email only in a browser window. Like it or not, using the“ cloud” means using someone else’ s computer. The email is not stored locally to you. It is only accessible when you have access to the internet. There may be times when you cannot get that access( a trip to the remote area of New Mexico taught me that) or the service itself might be down. Now it is unlikely that Google will ever go down, but other services have been known to vanish overnight. For a while recently, even the once mighty Yahoo was tipping on failure.
For those reasons, I use an email app on my laptop, suck down all the email off the various servers on the internet and delete them from there and store all messages locally. They are sorted and backed up using my 3-2-1 back up process.( See CBJ Spring 2017, Tech Talk.) Risks exist with this process. I could have a disk failure, I could delete something I wanted to keep, I could misfile a message where it does not belong. No system is truly idiot proof.( Make something idiot-proof, and they will build a better idiot. – Murphy’ s Law.) My server and my laptop and personal computing devices are backed up, so exported and current email is constantly duplicated redundantly so hopefully that will never be a problem.
Rules, rules, and more rules( So You Want To Be A Rock“ n’ Roll Star)
In addition to the various email in-boxes, I also use a series of“ rules” to process as many of the incoming messages as possible automatically. It is important to use whatever Spam™ filters, add-ins, or apps that are available to you. Those messages get trashed right away. Emails from clients get reviewed and responded to as necessary and then sorted into a folder kept for each client. Court notices( ECF or my state court) have calendar dates assigned and documents downloaded as necessary and then sorted into a sub-folder for each client. The NACBA communities( and previously the various NACBA Listserv) each get their own box and the messages there are threaded into the original post and replies. There my email app tells me how many messages in that box are unread and need attention.( You go 2 nd Circuit!)
National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys Winter 2018 CONSUMER BANKRUPTCY JOURNAL 43