I've blogged about potential uses for GMail before - Using Email as a Knowledge Base, How to Manage ListServs Using GMail, Keeping Track of TODO Items, and so on - and I offer yet another one. This idea came by way of Boing Boing: Archiving Email on GMail. The jist of the idea is to use GMail's abundant disk quota and Internet access as a means to backup email.
I've just implemented a couple Rules on Outlook to auto-forward all incoming emails to a separate GMail account setup exclusively to serve as a backup of my email accounts. Since I leave my home computer running 24x7, Outlook continuously downloads email from my various POP3 accounts and, now, will be continuously forwarding those emails to my GMail archive. The benefit, as I see it, is that I can be away from home and easily check my email messages - both ones I've received since leaving and old ones.
I accomplished this by creating a Rule in Outlook for each of the POP3 accounts I have, auto-forwarding the email to the GMail account postfixing the To address using the + system (as discussed in this blog entry) to help label/filter on GMail. Now if I'm on a laptop-free vacation, or just out and need to read an old email or check for new messages, all I need is an Internet connection!
My only concern is that the Outlook Rules engine doesn't integrate with SpamBayes, so it sends every message I get, rather than just sending those that pass the SpamBayes check. That means I'll be getting the gobs of spam and other assorted crapola in my GMail account. I suspect GMail's spam filters will pick up a good chunk of these, but early results look like a LOT still are getting through. I'm sure I could write some sort of VBA macro or something that would help reduce this, but the Rules approach was quick and easy so that'll do for now.