Au revoir, spam

Just a quick message to all you spammers out there: I won’t ever see your messages again.

I spent a rainy evening on vacation back home in Norway doing something I should have done before. Gathering all my various email accounts in one mastermail account. Not surprisingly, Gmail was chosen, for its ability to back up and sort/search large amounts of data. I already used one account to back up my illustrations (in case of.. you know… earthquakes) and one for junk email. But now I created another account to gather it all in one place. Gmail allows you to fetch email from 5 external pop3-enabled accounts. If you got more than that you just forward those to your Gmail. Although I might continue using a local email client, I leave a copy of most emails on the server so I never again have to worry about losing important emails or contact details when the Thunderbird inbox gets corrupted or the harddisk melts down.

Gmail’s spam filter is top notch, so why bother to unsubscribe from all those mailing lists when you can just hit “report spam” once and never ever see it again. While the new Live Hotmail frequently lets obvious spam messages (containing the most explicit words) through, gmail gets it right every time.

Doing most of my daily tasks from one single web interface at least makes me feel more effective than before. I moved my calendar from yahoo to my google account, I do collaborative online documents with my business partner using Google Docs and Spreadsheets, I check my website statistics with Analytics, and I read my geeky rss feeds with Google Reader. I also find new blogs I’m interested in with their blog search, and I find my way around Paris with Google Maps. I am not fond of putting all the eggs in one basket but so far I really don’t see any reason not to group all these services in one place. With only one password to remember…