It's all just ones and zeroes

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1358855]

I ask largely because I'm in the midst of changing notzen.com over to being gmail backed (which turns out to be very easy), and am having great fun balancing the needs of people who use clients (and gmail implements IMAP in an idiosyncratic manner) and people who use webmail (and are already sucking their email over to Gmail to read it).

I originally set up the domain so that I wouldn't have to change email address _again_ when I moved ISPs (my first three personal email addresses all being ISP-based ones), and I like having one that belongs to me. But more and more peopleI know seem to be switching over to happily using webmail, and being happy with gmail addresses...

Comments

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

I just redirect my domain email to gmail, which means if gmail goes down I switch off the redirect and collect stuff directly, and if the domain goes down and I really need to send or receive something I can use gmail for that.

Gmail also does a better job than anything else I ever found for identifying spam and hiding it from me, and it has more storage than I'm likely to use up for a LONG time. I also really like the new multi-inbox feature, although it looks awful on my laptop screen.

I mostly keep a tab open in my web browser for reading mail but I also get it via imap on my iPhone.

[andrewducker]

I've been rapidly running out of space at the domain I run, purely because the email is so massive. So moving across to gmail solves the spam problem and gives all the users much more space.

I use the web interface only when I need to search through the archives. Most of the time I use IMAP to my phone and Thunderbird.

[draconid.livejournal.com]

My webhost allows me to use Gmail to run the email of my own domain. Haven't switched to it because I prefer to have complete control. But it could solve the space issue if you could find someone who does something similar.

Or you could download an archive and delete all your old emails to reduce space?

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

What she said -- this is exactly what I do.

[onceupon.livejournal.com]

I have several domains and I forward them all to my primary gmail address. So therotund@therotund.com goes to onceupon@gmail.com and marianne.kirby@gmail.com goes to onceupon@gmail.com and everything else does the same and I only have to check one account. Which is important to me.

[miss-s-b.livejournal.com]

Same here

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

I answered "client" and "ISP" because I still use my ISP's included email (and Outlook, because I shelled out for Office so I'm gonna get my money's worth dammit) for my personal and private mail. The vast bulk of email that I receive is to a Yahoo account, but a good 80-90% of that is UCE because it's the account I show in public and thus the most 'bot-snaffable.

-- Steve is old-fashioned enough to prefer local clients and backups over "the cloud"... too many VAX-comas in university made him distrustful of any media he can't grab with his own hands.

[andrewducker]

I find that gmail does a great job with UCE - I hardly get any at all. And being able to access it via IMAP is a life-saver. Wouldn't have made the switch without that.

[andrewducker]

Oh, and I don't trust email stored on my hard drive. Had too many problems with that before - I'd much rather someone else was backing it up for me :->

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

I have a half-terrabyte portable drive and back up my stuff to it monthly. (Yeah, OneCare because I'm lazy and a 3-station license is cheaper than the other small business solutions I looked at. Between my computers and my Xbox I figure Billy G has a big chunk of my coin...) I even store it in a closet over the other side of my apartment, near the building core, as a rudimentary "remote storage" solution.

-- Steve's burned out a hard drive before. Parallel storage looks very good as a result.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I have a complete lashup of a system that involves storing my mail on a machine I run, but that uses my ISPs DNS. Who aren't the people that provide the bandwidth. Well, I say 'bandwidth'...

(Because it comfortably pre-dates gmail)

[natural20.livejournal.com]

"Read the questions..."

Yeah, so, my primary email account is forwarded on to gmail and shiny tweaking of from: and reply-to: headers sort the rest. Wasn't thinking when I answered. That said, people still, without ever being told to use it, use my gmail address, assuming it'll just work. This actually irritates me 'cos it's just assumption rather than knowledge.

Snowflake ...

[davidcook.livejournal.com]

My main e-mail address is @pobox.com - they only do mail forwarding (and first-line spam filtering), they don't provide an actual mail interface (web, POP, etc). I've had an account there since 1997 or so, through three or four ISPs, 6 changes of address, and two continents.
They currently forward my mail to Gmail and to a friend's personal server. I generally download my mail (using the gmail POP interface) into Thunderbird, but I can check my mail while I'm on the move using the web interface.

[drplokta]

I run my email through Spamassassin on my own server, then forward it on to my Gmail account. Anything that Spamassassin and Gmail both flag as spam gets deleted unread, but I get false positives in the stuff that only one of them flags.

[andrewducker]

Interesting. I pretty much gave up on checking my gmail spam filter. I do get the occasional false positive, but it seems generally very reliable.

[lilitufire.livejournal.com]

In theory I have firstnamelastname.com and all mail variants, but TBH I completely forget about this most of the time.

[alienspacebat.livejournal.com]

I have a fairly complex system where my main domain needs recognised emails and is only given to real people, a subdomain has a catchall and a blacklist system where i use say amazon@subdomain so I can identify if anyone sells my address and block spammers and I also have a spam subdomain for throwaway stuff which has a separate account.

i use webmail (squirrelmail) to access it from work as most online providers are blocked, imap from my nokia and imap and thunderbird at home

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

My email address is through an old ISP who now run a free mail service - I never bothered to change it!

[seph-hazard.livejournal.com]

Very slightly more complicatedly what in fact happens is that @persephonehazard.co.uk gets sent from dougs's server to my gmail account, from where I then suck it into Thunderbird. (Actually I think dougs has only set up seph@ and possibly abi@ to do that, to prevent spam. seph@ is my primary email.)