I’ve really gotten into e-mail subaddressing recently. It’s a pretty well known technique. In conjunction with GMail’s labels, filtering, and IMAP access it makes for a really powerful, private bookmarking tool accessible from just about anywhere.
I do a lot of information trapping. I have three different GReader accounts: two heavy with tech oriented or work related subscriptions and one I’m growing with more personal, less techy feeds. Not to mention the 77 subs I have in NetNewsWire. That’s four places where I might see interesting links, plus anything useful I come across in plain old browsing.
The one thing all of these applications have is the ability to e-mail a link with ease. GReader will actually e-mail a whole RSS item with an attendant note if you want. Browsers just use your standard e-mail application. I can easily e-mail to myself+notes@example.com from just about anywhere.
At the GMail end, I just filter on to:myself+notes and mark those incoming messages with the inventive label, notes. There’s also an option in GMail to remove filtered messages from the Inbox. Now my self notes don’t interfere with important incoming e-mail from real people.
Finally, the notes label appears as a folder in Thunderbird, which I can synch locally. This also makes for easy reading. To top it all off, I get great search either directly within GMail or with Google Desktop.
This strategy beats del.icio.us, or similar shared bookmarking sites, because it defaults to private not public. Plus posting to del.icio.us is somewhat inconveniently done through a Web interface, or bookmarklet, or something else not as ubiquitous as e-mail. Also, it’s easier to suck notes out of an e-mail store than del.icio.us.
I’m thinking about adopting this strategy for TODO management. Probably won’t go as hog wild exploiting GMail as Steve Rubel though.
Bonus: GMail also supports super-starring, for just that little bit of extra, instant metadata on notes.