Simplifying personal email archives
I’ve had some headaches keeping my personal email in line recently; I’m lugging around archives of email for the last 5+ years spread across several webmail accounts, and my primary personal email account has suffered recurring corruption problems lately (and I’ve outsourced my server admin). Finally, I’m accessing email from 3-4 different PCs in any given week and I turn over PCs frequently enough that trying to move archives around is a real hassle.
My solution, for now, is to move all of my archives to gmail and forward my personal mailbox there as well. Hopefully this simplifies my life a little as I can put the archiving out of mind and let gmail administer spam filtering instead of doing my own. I haven’t figured out how to get POP downloading to work across multiple PCs yet, but the gmail interface and options make it attractive enough to forego local email except on whatever laptop I’m using for travel.
The other thing I’m doing is setting my personal mail to be BCC’d to a second gmail account so that I’ve got a permanent archive of sent mail. I ran this for a while on my own server and like the way it works, but going to gmail is an easy switch and frees up some disk quota on my web server.
Based on what I’ve seen in the last week I’m giving two thumbs up to gmail. Thanks to Tomur for the invite; I’ve now got 50 invites if anyone else wants to try it. I started using GML to upload my local mail archives to gmail and then switched to gExodus. Neither of them is perfect but they’re easier than writing my own script.