Earlier I blogged about using GMail as a backup email store, by using an Outlook rule to automatically forward all incoming messages to a 'backup' GMail account. This particular means of implementation had many disadvantages, as I blogged about here. There were some great suggestions/solutions provided in the replies, particularly by Ivan and hurcane.
The short of it is, I went with the recommended implementation - configuring all email accounts to auto-forward all messages to a single GMail account, and then using GMail's free POP3 access to suck down the messages from GMail to Outlook. Here's how I set things up:
- Configured each account to auto-forward my email to GMail. I have four such accounts - one with my ISP, one for DataWebControls.com, one for 4Guys, and one for my business email. Fortunately, I was able to configure all of these accounts to forward to GMail. (In the comments of a past blog entry I had mentioned that I couldn't setup my WebHost4Life.com account to auto-forward emails... Ivan pointed out that WebHost4Life.com DID support this feature - he was right, I was wrong. I was looking in the web-based email, but I had to go into the control panel to setup the auto-forwarding...)
- Added filters in GMail for each of the four incoming accounts. Essentially, the filter was like, “for all emails coming in from mitchell@datawebcontrols.com, add the DataWebControls filter.“ I did not archive the incoming messages, because...
- I configured the POP3 access to auto-archive messages retrieved via POP access. This allows me to log into GMail and quickly see what messages have been downloaded to Outlook and what ones have not. Very useful if the computer is shut down and I am on the road, as I can see both past received mail and current mail received since hitting the road... Thanks, Ivan, for this tip!
One of my concerns with going to a GMail-centered “InBox” was that GMail's spam filters wouldn't be as good as my personalized SpamBayes Add-In in flagging spam. I'm not as concerned about GMail missing spam, since when I POP the content down, SpamBayes catches 99% of the spam... my main concern was that GMail would falsely flag good mail as spam (since spam mail isn't POPed down). So far I've found two false positives in the Spam folder (out of ~250 correctly identified spam messages).
There are a number of things I really like about using GMail as a centralized mail store, the main ones being the ability to read and search through messages while on the road, as well as having a centralized, online-accessible backup of my Inbox.
I have the following concerns:
- I used to have four incoming email accounts in Outlook, each with a different email address associated with it. When replying, the appropriate email address would be used. With my centalized GMail account, all email comes down through one account, so all replies are with a particular email address - mitchell@4guysfromrolla.com - regardless of what email account the message came from. This is an annoyance, but not a deal breaker. Hopefully there's some way to fenagle Outlook to get it to use the proper From email address somehow...
- I'm concerned on whether or not GMail accepts the same set of email attachments that my other email addresses accepted. If not, how does Gmail handle this? For example, say that Bob used to be able to send me emails with attachments of type .foo, but now GMail prohibits those. If Bob sends mitchell@4guysfromrolla.com a .foo attachment, will GMail send back a “We don't accept messages of this type“ to the original sender (Bob), or to the account that auto-forwarded the email? I imagine to Bob, but this may still confuse poor Bob because just last week he could send me .foo attachments.
- GMail's quota - I know 2.6 GB, or whatever it is now, is pretty high, but I get a lot of email. How long before this fills up? This may be moot because it appears that GMail doesn't count archived emails against your quota. If this is the case, then the quota is a non-issue since POPed messages are archived.
I hope this works out well. I'm always a bit remiss to tinker with my email setup because I use email so heavily and depend on it for communicating with clients, my editor, friends, and colleagues. I hope this move is a step in the right direction, since I think it will make email easier to access when on the road as well as provide an offline backup. We shall see.
What I hope to do eventually is make a little utility program that will, each night, zip up changed files since the last day and email them individually to a backup GMail account. This would provide an offline backup of important files, with a history, accessible from anywhere with an Internet connection. Ah, so many projects, so little time! :-)