I've been forwarding my email to Gmail and then keeping up with it as a backup email system including *reporting* the spam and archiving things once they no longer constitute something that is needing my current attention - something *in progress*.
I have a total of 52 emails in my in box and I've been using Gmail for about a month now. This is a wonderful experience. Compare that to my having something like 7000 emails in my regular inbox. Because I transferred my *sent* mail folder and and few other things to gmail and I'm forwarding all emails to gmail, I've got about 1700 messages on gmail already. But there's only 52 that are sitting in my inbox! This is a great feeling. A place that's not overwhelming.
The reason this is working is that I *believe* that I can find mail that is archived without having been labeled (the equivalent of filing it in a particular folder). I have a backup which is my regular email system on Apple Mail, which by the way I'm treating more like Gmail and moving inbox items into an *inbox archive* folder. Maybe because I have thousands of messages in my inbox, I'm not really keeping up with it like on Gmail.
I'm getting less spam. The spam filters are starting to work. Of course, I haven't checked my spam to make sure it's all really spam. My sense is that they're pretty conservative about removing spam, but I should check it I suppose. I just checked and there have been 7000 messages put into spam so far. Whoa!
I found that Camino .8 works better than Safari, at least on one key point. There's a bug in Safari that doesn't allow you to move down your list of messages with the *j* keyboard equivalent once it needs to scroll down. It just doesn't work. So, tonight I tried it on Camino and it worked perfectly. Guess I use Camino for Gmail access.
Camino seems very fast too. The only problem with Camino that I've found so far is that it is listing ALL of my bookmarks assigned to the bookmark bar - wrapping to three rows which uses up too much space on my Powerbook. I should just do some major edits on my bookmarks, obviously. But, I liked the way that Safari keeps them available with the arrow at the end of the row. That way, the most important ones get to be visible and the rest are nearby.
Back to Gmail. I'm happy with the speed. It's been performing well lately. I'm just liking it more as time goes on. I'm liking the threaded aspect as it makes my list of messages shorter.
Now, the problem is that I can't really make it my main email because:
- My main email is [email protected], my own domain name. I want to use that. I suppose, eventually, Gmail may offer a way to allow you to use your own domains?
- The adsense/privacy thing. I don't even notice them, but I still am not comfortable exposing my clients to that *intrusion* of sorts when I certainly can afford my own *for pay* email account that doesn't force my clients to have their mail analyzed by some *bot* somewhere. If there's a 90% acceptance rate on Gmail, then I would feel comfortable.
- It's online. I still feel nervous and limited by that. I've always been able to work on my email while unconnected.