A while ago now, I changed my email address from whatever it was before (can’t remember now) to an iTools address. iTools is the service that Apple ran for Mac users that was free and “for life”. However, Apple decided they didn’t want to honour their agreement anymore, renamed iTools to .Mac and started charging money for it.
I had a good look around at the time because I didn’t want to go through the pain of migrating email addresses again. I eventually settled on a bigfoot.com address. I’m a cheapskate so I’ve got a free account which forwards emails to my ISPs account. It’s got limitations but I rarely hit them. Of course, since setting up the bigfoot account, I haven’t actually changed ISPs or anything so the benefit of a “permanent” email address has yet to be realized.
So lately I’ve been noticing more and more the performance and SPAM issues that come from having all of my mail forwarded through bigfoot.com. About half of my email is SPAM and my ISP isn’t that great at filtering it out. My mail client catches the rest but it’s still crap that I have to download. Worse, emails sent though bigfoot.com can take several hours to arrive. I know email isn’t supposed to be instantaneous but most services are much quicker than that.
I didn’t bother looking at Google before because I didn’t want the pain of changing email addresses but after reading a hint somewhere I thought of a cunning plan.
1) My bigfoot.com address will remain indefinitely and will forward to my Google account (though less email will go through bigfoot).
2) Online services will send mail direct to my Google account.
3) Google will filter out spam more effectively than my ISP.
4) Mail.app will pick up mail from Google instead of my ISP and I won’t even notice the difference.
The important part here is number 2. I have never used my ISP address anywhere because if I change ISPs in a hurry and forget the password to the web site at the same time I’m screwed. Quite a lot of my email comes from online services rather than from people. Almost all of the time-critical email comes from online services. This is really the same as switching to Google but I’m keeping my old address around.
It’s been a few days since I switched over. So how is it going?
I noticed immediately that downloading from Google is much slower than from my ISP. For regular emails that’s not a big deal but my dad sends me lots of email forwards with big attachments so I’ve filtered them to my ISP account.
Emails that are sent to Google instead of via bigfoot are arriving much more quickly.
I usually do all of my email stuff in Mail.app but sometimes I want to access email from somewhere else. I never had the option to do that before but with Google holding onto my emails this is now a possibility.
Spam blocking is awesome. So far I’ve had no false positives and a 100% detection rate. I have an old Yahoo! account that I used at Uni and it still lets SPAM though.
