Shiny new e-mail address

[peteryoung]

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.

Comments

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

With Gmail, my overriding experience is that although I get 300 spam e-mails a day (my address is on Usenet, so it's not surprising), it all goes into my Spam folder and I extremely rarely get any through to my Inbox. Google appear to have a kickass spam filter.

[lamentables.livejournal.com]

Very happy with gmail - virtually spam-free - and I can't think of any downsides. I've found that you don't need to use 'googlemail' in the address, and that 'gmail' will reach you.

[miramon.livejournal.com]

I've found gmail to be very good. You do occasionally have to check the spam, but I haven't had any false positives for quite a while now.

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

I've just looked in the spam folder and found a very dodgy one from a Victor F. Gonzalez. Could it be...??

[dfordoom.livejournal.com]

As others have said, their spam filter actually works. I find gmail to be exceptionally reliable, very easy to use and pretty much trouble-free. I now use it for 99% of my email needs.

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

Great. All you need now is a Mac... ;)

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Splendidly reliable, great spam filter, accessible anywhere (except my work which blocks it), fast. I use gMail for everything.

[dougs.livejournal.com]

As above -- the best spam filter I've seen. I use it for subscriptions to dodgy mailing lists, I get about forty legitimate emails and about twenty spams a day, and although I get a false negative once a week or so I haven't had a false positive in aaaages.

[annafdd.livejournal.com]

Gmail has never, ever let me down. I have now switched everything to it (any other address gets funnelled through it) and left my spam filtering service four years ago as a result. Accessible from everywhere, quick, easy to use, it's made of win.

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

gmail is excellent, and you can set up the mail system as a file system to store data files on, which can be accessed from anywhere worldwide.

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

I didnt know anyone actually did that :-)

[andrewducker]

Gmail is great. I'm using it for the backing store of my ducker.org.uk email address. And now they support IMAP I can use thunderbird as my email client with it too!

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

I've found gmail to be fine. I dont believe googlemail is any different except for being a different name because of legal reasons in the UK