Sunday, May 14, 2006

Gmail replacing Mail.app and other thick clients

The link for this post isn't completely relevant too the post, but it's the 3rd blog this morning that mentions abandoning thick email clients for Gmail. I figured I might as well mention what I do.

I read my personal email on a bunch of machines, some running XP, some OS X. Like the bloggers I read this morning I switched some months ago to using Gmail as my primary mail client.

The usual practice is to use Gmail's POP support to pull older email to a thick client periodically. That way one retains ownership of data, but I believe this also deletes the messages from Gmail. I like having my searchable archive there, where the NSA can read it most readily.

I fork my email streams instead. All my mail eventually redirects to a domain I control, it sends one stream to Gmail and one to my ISPs POP server. This does mean I need to see spam twice, but that's how I periodically discover that Gmail is sending valid email to their spam folder. (In contrast my ISP's spam filters are now excellent, I really don't get all that much spam through that route.)

Bottom line -- Gmail is really good. Other than search, it's Google's hit product.

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