I don’t know what my problem is, but I have WAY too many e-mail addresses to deal with. Many of them I have forwarded to/checked by gmail, but that still doesnt solve the problem fully because, for one reason or another, I still have multiple gmail accounts. I have used plugins for firefox over the years, but am irritated at having to constantly have a browser open sucking up resources I’d rather have being used somewhere else.
Finally, an easy app has been released to help monitoring multiple gmail accounts easy. The app is called Notify, and is produced by a company called Vibealicious. They describe it best when they say it’s “like a menu bar app, but better.” Like a menubar app, it lives in the menu bar and changes slightly by adding color and a number when new messages arrive, but once you click, TADA! It pops open a tabbed window showing your accounts with new messages and previews.
It is not without its issues like the fact that it opens some odd google error page when you double click on a message, and it doesn’t automatically log you into the appropriate account when opening up gmail, but it is 1.0. The developers have already slated a .1 release for mid September to include support for google apps and possibly imap which shows a thriving development. It boils down to this: Notify is an amazing tool that seems to be a pretty good answer to my (and your?) multi-account email dilemma.
Had a similar problem. Solved it quite simply. I closed out several email accounts! (I had seven at one point and things kept getting lost. Now I only have a couple and things are going ever so much more swimmingly) Having lots of email accounts were just cluttering up my life and encouraging me to sign up for every newsletter that looked the slightest bit interesting. In the end I was overcome with more stuff than I could possibly read, use or absorb. In the end the equation became less a matter of “managing” my email and more a matter of slimming the stream down.