I moved my primary mail account from SpamCop to Gmail earlier this week. I’m
a long-time SpamCop user, but Gmail may have won me over purely because of the
storage issue combined with spam fighting. Here’s a rundown on why I made the
move, plus how the two compare and making use of Gmail as an infinite backup
even if you go for POP downloading.
First of all, let me explain that I get a lot of email. I receive on the
order of 100 to 200 messages per day that are NOT spam and that I need to
respond to, read or deal with in some way. Add to that spam, which can generate
200 to 300 emails per day, and you can see why I’ve never thought it that great
to try and read my email through my phone. I’d get swamped.
About three years ago, I needed to go on a trip for two weeks with no
internet access. I was absolutely paranoid that I’d never be able to dig out
from all the spam. I even asked my readers not to email me.
Fortunately, one did and turned me on to
SpamCop. They have a filtered email system that
runs only $30 per year. I
could redirect all my mail to them, then have the spam filtered out.
Prior to this, I ran my own POP account through my calafia.com domain. Each
day, like many others, I would download all my mail from it — good stuff and
spam combined. With SpamCop, I forwarded all my email to SpamCop and downloaded
from there. In my mail program, Outlook, I still used my own outgoing mail
server and set all the settings so that no one saw my SpamCop address but rather
my calafia.com one. As far as the outside world was concerned, SpamCop did not
exist.
It worked great. I can’t remember the amount of spam it caught, but it was in
the thousands of pieces when I got back from my trip. I’ve stuck with it ever
since. As added protection, I also use
MailWasher. Before I download into Outlook, I use MailWasher to do a quick
grab of what’s in my inbox on the SpamCop mail server. SpamCop does a good job,
but some spam still gets through. MailWasher lets me spot that which does and
set up further blocks plus do deletes. If spam manages to get past those two
steps, there Outlook’s junk mail filter kicks it. I rarely depend on that.
This week, SpamCop went down for some reason. I couldn’t login and get my
mail. I dropped a support note but didn’t hear back soon after that (in fact,
I’m still waiting). Nothing was posted on the email system news
page. Not wanting to be without
my mail for even a short period, I thought I’d check out Gmail’s POP downloading
feature.
I’ve had a Gmail account since the day it
launched and have 1.7GB of mail in there now, 63 percent of my always increasing
quota. What happens is that soon after Gmail launched, I started sending all my
mail to both SpamCop and Gmail. Anything at SpamCop got deleted. But I figured
I’d see if I could push past the original 1GB limit at Gmail. After about a
year, I was just about to when they upped the mail box size.
Over time, I realized Gmail was working as an excellent backup system for my
email. I tend to delete sent and received messages in Outlook every two or three
months. If I need them, I used to go back to archived versions of Outlook and
open them up, a painful process. But by forwarding to both SpamCop and Gmail, I
got the advantage of a nice clean inbox along with access to all my inbound mail
over time.
At launch, Gmail didn’t have POP downloading. Now it does. So in checking it
out, I realized there was no particular need to keep with SpamCop. Despite this
week’s hiccup, it’s been a great service that I happily recommend. But Gmail can
do what SpamCop does for me and more, all within the same account.
When you go into Gmail, there’s a Settings link that leads to a Forwarding
and POP tab. The options here were dead impressive and sold me on it. Sure, you
can start doing POP downloads of your email and pull down everything in there.
But check out other things you might not realize you can do:
Download only mail from the time you enabled it onward. Why’s that
cool? I have over 50,000 items in my inbox at Gmail from over the past nearly
two years. I don’t want to download and read again this stuff that I already
read via SpamCop. This feature made it easy for me to get going downloading only
the new stuff.
Archive downloaded messages. Fantastic! I like a nice clean inbox.
However, I don’t want to delete messages out of Gmail. Here’s the perfect
solution. Anything I download gets moved out of my inbox and archived. I still
have access to it, but my inbox stays nice and tidy. That sold me.
Still, I’ve got one big problem. Those 50,000 items are still messing up my
goal of a clean inbox. How do I archive those? You have to move them manually,
100 items at a time. That sucks. And there’s no mass move solution. I checked
with Google and they’re considering this, but it’s not out there yet. Fair to
say, I’m not going to be clicking 500 times to do it myself.
I’m debating setting up a separate Gmail account to use temporarily as a way
around this. But why care about having a nice clean inbox if I POP? Because if
I’m on the road, then I like to go into web mail as a quick way to check on
anything pressing and reply.
SpamCop offers web mail like this, and it has worked well for me. I also go
into it each day to check what the spam filter has caught and clean that out.
There’s usually one or two items that I need to whitelist — not bad when it
catches 200 to 300 items per day.
As a workaround, I archived a bunch of stuff in my Gmail inbox so that it’s
clear from the dates where the old and new begins. I did the same with the spam
mail it has caught, so that I could begin scanning more easily only new stuff
each day to see if there were any false catches (I’ve got about 11,000 spam
items caught so far over the last 30 days; Gmail deletes all spam that’s older
than this).
I was confused about where my archived mail went at first. I wanted to put it
into a folder, since I’m a folder oriented type of person. Gmail, of course,
uses labels. But what was the tag it used for archived mail? I realized the All
Mail labels shows you both your archived mail and inbox mail in the same screen.
What about Yahoo Mail? I have access to
the new Yahoo Mail beta, which is awesome. My wife is a regular user of it,
because it looks and feels like Outlook, which she was used to.
One thing I dislike about Gmail are the threaded conversations, at least by
default. I want to see what’s new in my inbox. But the way things are displayed,
it’s hard to tell at a glance if something really is new because of the way it
combines related mail.
I’ve gotten more used to this, and I often I love it when searching for mail,
as opposed to checking on new mail. But I far prefer the more traditional "see
the individual message" listed option. Then if I want a conversation view, let
me click that for a particular message. But Gmail has no options like this.
So why not send my mail to Yahoo as well or instead of Gmail? Actually, I
did. At one point, I forwarded mail to SpamCop, Google and Yahoo and in
particular was going to track their spam catching abilities. But I moved on to
other things, then my Yahoo account filled up and started sending out "mailbox
full" messages that panicked people. It quickly came off my forwarding list.
I’m going to check things out again. Unlike Gmail, however, you have to pay
for POP access through Yahoo Mail Plus.
That gives you "virtually unlimited storage" of 2GB of mail rather than the
standard 1GB.
So, Yahoo falls down on cost and storage compared to Google. But honestly, I
can also understand charging for POP. It’s not like I’m going much at Gmail. But
then again, I actually am. I’m in there daily checking on spam or doing a late
night peak for new messages when the main work computer is off. When I’m
traveling, I’ll also be there as well. I won’t be at Yahoo — maybe that POP
access really is worth giving for free.
I’ll report back on if Gmail adds that bulk delete tool. Yahoo certainly
beats them on this in terms of clearing a spam folder. By pushing empty, I can
wipe everything in my spam folder at Yahoo with one click. I can’t tell how easy
it is to move hundreds of messages from the inbox to another folder, but I’ll
find that out in short order. Once concern already at Yahoo Mail is that in the
beta, unlike traditional Yahoo Mail, I see no "select all" or "check all"
option. Hope I’m not going to have to scroll through thousands of messages. I’m
also going to check just a bit on how they seem to fare on the spam fighting
front.
FYI, any company doing your mail should be able to forward it to one or more
addresses easily. If not, find another company! I believe that you should always
own your own domain and use that rather than an @yahoo.com, @gmail.com or
whatever address for another service. Forward to them, but maintain your own
identity, and you can always migrate elsewhere if need be. My friend Rob’s
Tiger Tech hosting service can get you your
own domain, mailbox, aliasing etc for $7 per month. There are probably cheaper
and maybe easier options, but Rob’s good, plus I can ply him with wine gums for
any of my special needs.
By the way, in case you missed it, Jeremy Zawodny had a great piece called
30 Day Gmail and
Yahoo! Mail Challenge Results, where he summarized experiences giving up
desktop mail and going for web mail exclusively, as a test. Like me, he was
already forwarding stuff over to Gmail (his personal email) and to Yahoo (his
work mail).
He’s sticking with Gmail for personal mail, though he wishes they’d bring in
folders rather than labels (me too). He liked Yahoo Mail but found it needed
more changes to be useful in managing the amount of email he gets from work.
Using Gmail as My
Spam Filter covers him making use of Gmail as a spam filter in the same way
I’ve now shifted from SpamCop to Gmail — plus you get a nice screenshot.
Finally, unlike Jeremy, I could never make the jump to web mail. Blame
travel. I get through a serious amount of email when I’m on a long flight from
the UK to the US. I need my mail portable.
