Gmail Has Solved Our Email Spam Problem
October 31st, 2007, 4 Comments »
About a year ago, I switched both my personal and email accounts over to Gmail for Domains. For the uninitiated, this means that we use the Gmail inteeface, but can retain our @darrenbarefoot.com and @capulet.com address.
Things were bumpy for the first couple of months, but since then it’s been awesome. There are plenty of advantages–great search, no backup anxiety, email access anywhere, a decent and improving web interface, IMAP support (though I don’t use it, it’s nice to know it’s there). However, the biggest change is a fairly subtle one–the grouping of email threads together into conversations. It makes my email usage way more efficient.
Lately I’ve combined Gmail with Mailplane (thanks to Tara for the recommendation), which is kind of an application shell for Gmail. It doesn’t provide a ton of stuff I desperately want, but it does get my email client out of the browser. That, combined with the drag-and-drop attachment functionality, makes it worth the US $25 I paid for a ‘family’ license.
I was reminded to write in praise of Gmail because I spotted this Gmail marketing piece via Digg. It indicates that 70% of the email to Gmail accounts is spam, yet their spam-blocking is so effective that less than 1% gets through.
I believe those numbers. I’ve had my darrenbarefoot.com account public for six or seven years, and I maybe receive one to two spam messages in my inbox.
That’s a fantastic improvement over a few years ago. My email spam problem is pretty much solved.
For now.