Two Email Accounts => Can Only Keep Up With One

If I have more than one email account - e.g. work (Outlook) and gmail (personal) I can only ever keep up with one of them. I can only regularly drive one of them to zero, in the GTD manner.



Any of the various "unified mailboxes" {c,w,sh}ould help



- except that my employer doesn't want me to have corporate email outside their control, and I don't want personal email on my employer's email system.



And even if that were not the issue, using separate email systems avoids embarassing errors, like cross forwarding.



It would be nice if unified email systems had some sort of "Are you really sure that you mean to forward a TOP SECRET company email to a public mailing list?" filter/query applied to outgoing email.  Actually, for that matter, applying to saving email to the filesystem "Are you sure that you want to save your tax refund message from the IRS on a company share drive?"



Keeping separate email systems reduces the chance of such an error.  But it comes at the cost, of having two email systems.  And it seems that I can never keep up with two at the same time.  I am either keeping up with work, or with personal.



One of the costs of keeping two email systems is - what do they call it, cognitive overload?  Gmail does some things one way, Outlook a different way.  Or not at all, Or vice versa.  Two different tagging and folder systems. Two...  Using both regularly educates me as to their relative strengths and weaknesses - e.g. I recently accessed Gmail through IMAP on my personal copy of Outlook, because Outook is much better a handling large amounts of accumulated email than Gmail is - but I really don't want to become an expert in comparative email systems.



Another "advantage" of two email systems is scheduling.  E.g, I can try to restrict myself to never look at personal email during work hours, and vice versa. But...  well, how many of us can get away with not looking at work email on the weekend? Or overnight?  During a project crunch?



EMACS Gnus solved this years ago with mail reading topic modes.  You might have one order for reading messages, both in inboxes and folders, at work, one after work, one for "quick check", one for handling your mailing lists...   Two email systems is just a hack, a kluge, a poor approximation.



Plus, not reading personal email at work means that my wife and others have to use text messaging as the "high priority" emal equivalent.  Which means that thee is a third messaging system.



So perhaps I am wrong when I say "If I have 2 email systems I can only stay caught up with one of them."



Perhaps it is that if I have 3 messaging systems - Outlook, Gmail, and SMS Text Messaging  - I can only stay caught up with 2 of them.  Or maybe it is N, N-1.