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My Google Mail work flow

October 8th, 2011 by David Bradley >> No Comments

I use Google Mail. There I’ve admitted it. In my experience, it seems to have the best spam filtering so I pipe my various website addresses and legacy ISP addresses into a GMail account to filter out the crapflood. But, rather than reading my email on the GMail web page, which is an awful experience, I have it set up as an IMAP account and it syncs to the Mozilla Thunderbird email program and to whatever smart mobile device I happen to be using when I’m out and about or not workign with my laptop.

Actually, there is a little bit more to my setup than that. I run two main Google accounts, one for friends and contacts and one for site registrations and for more public dissemination (like when I comment on blogs etc). Those old ISP accounts and the email associated with my websites are piped to this latter account. I also have an account I use as an IMAP archive with all the searchability of GMail, I transferred old emails with separate labels (which act like folders in Thunderbird) on to this account, it took quite a while as there were literally tens of thousands of emails to move. I also have an account that acts as a repository for the emailed backups from the blogs. I gave that account a rather silly, almost random name, and it never gets any spam (it’s been operating for about 4 years). Only trouble is the backups are big, so I have to clear the oldest ones out in batches of twenty or so every few weeks to stop it topping out at the 7.5Gb limit for GMail accounts.

That’s about it. Not sure if this was of even vague interest, except to emphasise that GMail is good at spam filtering, works as webmail, POP3 or IMAP, is useful as a repository for automated backups that can be sent by email and has the possibility of using the account as a cloud storage space, a Google Drive, if you will using Gladinet or some other tool.

I also use Mail Store Home to backup the emails from the main two acccounts, which might sound a little redundant, but it means that should you have no access to an account you can always retrieve important emails from the offline backup.

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