Tag: GMail

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New Email Address

Due to unfortunate circumstances, I have decided to change email address. It appears my email address was leaked and it has been receiving a ton of spam recently. It’s also what prompted me to post Why is There No Universal Email Web Client? last week.

After a long deliberation, I decided to give GMail a try. The main reasons being:

  • Ability to import emails from different accounts
  • Ability to send emails as different accounts
  • Free POP3, IMAP, and ActiveSync support
  • Emails are kept forever
  • Great spam filter
  • Tons of space

I know the last 2 are given for most email services these days, but did you know that Yahoo! still charges if you want POP3?!?!

I never knew how much I would love that deleting emails == archiving emails. No longer do I need to manually move emails I want to keep into a specific folder. Just delete it and if I ever need to find it again, I just have to search for it.

I was initially hesitant to give up all my email to Google, like they don’t know enough about me already. But I decided for the convenience, it would be worth it. I also consider hosting my email server on GMail, but decided to hold off on that for now.

Moving my email over did take a bit of time as I’m guessing (drag and drop) IMAP to IMAP via Outlook isn’t exactly the most efficient. But I went from occupying less than 1% of my email space quota to You are currently using 1325 MB (17%) of your 7586 MB.

Emails to my old address will still work (albeit with a delay), as they’re automatically imported by GMail every so often. My new email address is basically the same as my old one, but instead of *@krunk4ever.com, it’s *@gmail.com.

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Why is There No Universal Email Web Client?

Wow. It’s been over a month since my last blog post. And who would’ve thought possible, but I think I got sunburnt today. Really? My forearms are really red…

Today I wanted to rant about a technology that should’ve existed a long time ago, but I have not found any company that offers the product I want. Back before GMail made its debut, everyone was using Outlook or Eudora (I still remember servicing Eudora clients during my college job).

However, once GMail came out, that changed how people began to use email. Shortly after, Hotmail (now Live Mail) and Yahoo followed suit, with the convenient access and the high storage capacity. And for most people, that’s enough. Most people only have 1 personal email address and 1 work email address, and GMail and these other web email solutions work out great for them.

However, one of the main reasons people I think people have stuck with Outlook or Mail is the fact it can support multiple accounts. I have 4 or 5 different email accounts that I use on a regular basis and it’s extremely convenient to be able to access all of them in 1 simple application. I can search through ALL my emails, quickly glance to see which accounts have new emails, select which email account I want to send from, etc.

In today’s model, each email service has its on web client. If I didn’t have access to my computer or smart phone and wanted to check my email through a public terminal or a friend’s computer, I would have to sign in and out of each email account on their respective websites, which is a hassle.

Why hasn’t anyone made a email client web app that supports multiple email accounts. Outlook does have a web version called OWA (Outlook Web Access), but it only works for the exchange server that is backing it. I want to be able to provide an app with my email credentials and it would go and fetch all my email into 1 convenient location, where I can access from any computer in the world.

GMail does support fetching email from external accounts into your GMail account and they even have the ability to send as a different email address (once verified), but you lose the separation of accounts, which I find important.

Before I got my smart phone, the way I got around this was remoting back into my PC at home and using Outlook on that machine. I still do that today, but with my smart phone which also has access to all my email accounts, it’s has become less of an issue. Still I find myself composing emails through the remote session since typing emails that are more than a couple sentences long is such a pain on your smart phone.

Maybe one day, my wish will come true.