Shiny new e-mail address

A couple of days ago my e-mail ISP crashed and burned yet again: I can't download mail using POP3, which I have learned through painful experience is the first warning sign that things are about to get much worse. That's now three times in the last year, and each time it took them at least a month to fix, each time with the S.O.B. that they're moving everything onto new servers (maybe they were, what do I know, but three times a year??). Well, guess what, it's Christmas, which means that with the utterly useless Breathe running the show I can forget about things getting sorted until at least January or, on past experience, perhaps sometime around late February. So screw 'em.

Yesterday afternoon I spent a few hours setting up what I hope will be a reliable e-mail service from Googlemail, the UK equivalent of Gmail. So far so good. What have been other people's experiences? Any downside? Spam overload or spam-free?

My preferred new e-mail for everything is now peteyoung [dot] uk [at] googlemail [dot] com, so please update your address book if you have me in there. All up-to-date contact details are in a friends-locked post here. I'll also be appending all my e-mails with a **please note new e-mail address** signature in case people missed this. Thanks.

2007 books

106) Bruce Chatwin, Utz, 1988   (RE-READ)
Chatwin was often brought to book for his over-embellishment of the lives of living people so it's likely that the slippery character of the late Czechoslovakian porcelain collector Kaspar Utz has been subjected to the same fate, though this time it seems Chatwin is a little more careful to conceal his characters' real identities. Utz was a man of a minor European nobility, figuratively imprisoned by his collection of rare Messein porcelain, and Chatwin ultimately portrays him as a rather sad figure. It's hard to tell the degree of artistic licence he took with his last novel, but certainly there are passages in which he lets his imagination take flight about Utz's annual visits to Vichy in France. It's also a cautionary tale for collectors of whatever stripe and there's no denying it reads exceptionally well too, whatever amount of fictionalising Chatwin may have indulged in. Recommended.