It’s been almost a year since I switched to Google’s Gmail (web-based email), and it’s been such a quantum leap forward in email functionality for me that I decided to post an unsolicited plug. Hooray for Google, I hope they keep innovative stuff like this coming.
It is approximately 99.96% effective at trapping spam and keeping it quarantined in an out-of-the-way folder. Its spam trap is so effective that I stopped disguising my email address a long time ago, everywhere I have it posted on the web, on newsgroups, etc.—which makes it a lot easier for others to send me comments. Yes, I do get ninety or more spam emails a day (and growing), but what do I care? I almost never see any of them in my Inbox, because Gmail sends them directly into its Spam box.
Whenever I feel like wiping them out en masse, I go to the Spam box and zap them all into the bit bucket with two clicks: “Select all” and “Delete forever.” (In the Spam box you can also designate any email as “not spam”; conversely, in the Inbox, you can designate any email as “spam”. Gmail remembers those corrections for future incoming emails.)
The other things I like a lot about Gmail:
• I never delete anything (except spam), I just “archive” old emails to clean up the inbox.
• Because all my email is saved forever, on their server, I can use Google’s powerful search functionality to find stuff that was long-since archived. Just a vaguely remembered word, phrase, or name is all I need to retrieve that email I’d forgotten about for eight months.
• I’ll never run out of disk space, I bet. Google seems to keep bumping up my allocation as I accumulate stuff in my archive. I am currently using 287 MB (11%) of the 2707 MB they “allocate” to me.
• I took the time to set up labels—such as “Blog,” “Business,” “Family,” “Friend”—and to set up filters that tell Gmail which label(s) to attach to an incoming email. That categorization makes for easy archiving and retrieval.
• Gmail is web-based, so my emails don’t pile up when I’m on a laptopless vacation. I can check my email from anyone’s computer, as long as it can get to the web.
I’m a happy customer, can you tell?
If you don’t already use Gmail, get somebody to invite you.
[Full disclosure: After a few months of experience with Gmail, I bought a few shares of Google, just so I could say I was one of Google's owners. I plan to be an owner for as long as Google keeps innovating.]
