Last week I blogged about using GMail as an online email backup service. Essentially, I added an Outlook rule that auto-forwarded all incoming messages to my GMail account. The idea was that I could then check this account when away from my desktop computer to see my latest messages. I think the idea is grand and useful, but using Outlook rules to accomplish this is far less than ideal.
This morning I turned off the Outlook rules due to the following three annoyances:
- Outlook forwarded every incoming message to GMail. Problem is, 90+% of the email I get is spam. SpamBayes scuttles about 99% of the spam I get to a Junk Email folder, so I don't see it in my Inbox. However, my GMail account is flooded with spams, and the GMail filters only catch a small percentage of the deluge of crapola.
- Since every message is forwarded by Outlook, every message has the little 'forwarded' icon next to it (versus the unread message icon). Just an aesthetics thing, but annoying, since I use that as a visual cue to quickly determine how the message has been handled (unread, replied to, or forwarded). Furthermore, the forwarded messages sent to GMail have my signature, the subject line prepended with FW:, and so on. More aesthetic issues...
- My Sent Mail folder exploded in size. Since I get hundreds of emails a day and each and every one was forwarded to my GMail account, I end up with a Sent Mail folder that has a lot of bloat, including forwards of all those spams mentioned in complaint #1. Furthermore, Google Desktop Search - which I use to quickly search my Inbox - returns a bunch of crap results from the Sent Mail folder.
So I've suspended forwarding my incoming mail to GMail. I think the idea is a good one, but it needs to be implemented at the POP server level, and only after aggressive spam filtering has taken place. Ideally, there would be some service that would very often poll my computer for changes to 'important files' and, if I am online (which I always am, unless the DSL is down), it would backup those changes to some online respository (like GMail) from which I could easily restore later or view/download the files from some remote location. (Say I'm on the road and forgot to move over an important file to the laptop. I could just hop onto the online service and pull down the file, or any past revision of the file that was backed up.)
Speaking of GMail uses, Arjan Zuidhof left the following comment in my blog entry about using GMail as an email backup service:
Scott, since you mentioned the Knowledge Base tip some time ago, I've used GMail for this. Took an hour to happily subscribe to all newsletters and mailinglists I stopped subscribing to since blogs and RSS arrived. Since then, more than 10.000 items pile up there, taking about 5-6% of my space. However, I find that in practice, I'm rarely using GMail to find stuff. Google itself has indexed the net in such a superb way, that this extra knowledge base is actually a bit superflous. In the end, everything in my inbox is also indexed by Google, because it's available at some URL.
Arjan, I've found the same thing - why bother searching the GMail KB when Google search can do such a good job on its own. I still do think GMail is a great resource for effectively managing listservs, and if you are on private, non-indexed listservs, then the archiving/searching functionality is quite useful. However, for general, public listservs, you're right - using GMail as a knowledge base, while cool in theory, is really not too useful in execution.