The other night, during Cory Arcangel’s presentation at Jihui, I noticed he used Gmail as his mail client. “Hmm,” I thought, “if someone as smart as Cory is using it, perhaps I should check it out again.”

So I embarked on what I pompously called my “Grand Email Unification Experiment.” It seems to be working. I forwarded my two most-used email addresses to the Gmail account and started using it as my single access point.

POP or not to POP
At first I used it to connect via POP and download to my client but I realized that this was destroying the purpose of having it in one place. The real power would come from the filtering and the labeling features in Gmail so that I could get my email exactly how I like it anywhere with a web browser handy. So now I’ve just decided to use the POP feature to download the email once in a while (essentially a back-up for when the ‘net goes down and I need to find some essential info).

Spam
Gmail’s spam filtering seems very good. After a few days I’ve only gotten 2 or 3 false negatives (it was spam but wasn’t marked as such) and no false positives. I was using a 3rd-party service to filter spam, but Gmail catches more. By forwarding one’s email to Gmail, then connecting via POP to download one could use Gmail as a free spam filter. You won’t download the spam and would just need to check Gmail once in a while to check for false positives.

No one needs to know
The feature that allows one to add accounts to Gmail means that no one needs to know that I’m using Gmail. I can send email from any of my other addresses.

One gripe
Gmail doesn’t work as well with Safari as it does with Firefox. I prefer Safari for browsing and Firefox for Gmail. I wish there was a way to set the Gmail Notifier app to open any browser, not the default browser set in Safari preferences. permanent link to this post