[Web4lib] Webmail and the ocean of spam

[Richard Wiggins]

Like Maurice, I route both e-mail from my day job and from my various other
personas to my Gmail account.  I now have over 30,000 messages in my in-box
and am currently using 1887 MB (70%) of my 2695 MB.  Gmail's spam filtering
is quite effective, although I have noticed that false positives are a
little more common than expected, especially for commercial mail from
vendors with whom I do have a legitimate relationship.

Gmail works on any Web browser anywhere, including the Blazer browser on my
Treo 650.

That's the good news.  Here's the bad news: Google seems to think Gmail
shoukd morph into AOL.  They are integrating chat, talk, desktop search,
etc.  and burdening the first prominent Ajax app and the best Webmail client
ever written with features that clutter the screen and slow things down.

I divide my life into Before Gmail and After Gmail. Just yesterday I was in
a meeting where we needed to fetch a document written to the team months
ago.  One quick search over a wireless laptop connection and the document
has in hand.

If Google keeps overloading Gmail with irrelevant features,  I see the
possibility of having to move onto another platform.  But for now it's a
very viable solution to your spam issue.

/rich

PS -- I also keep a private Gmail account to which I send copies of
presentations and important documents for even faster searching and
fetching.  For instance, I send all presentations that I give to this
account.  A virtual thumb drive.

On 2/15/06, Maurice York <maurice.york at emory.edu> wrote:
>
> I also have routed all my email address to a gmail account. It catches
> hundreds of spam messages a week that our institutional filters don't
> get, and very little gets through. Gmail also has address "masking"
> now as well, so you can send messages and have them look like they're
> coming from your institutional mail or any other account you hold (as
> this one does). Not to mention many other features that make it the
> best email program I've ever used. It's a beautiful thing.
>
> -Maurice
>
> On 2/15/06, Robert Sullivan <robert.g.sullivan at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > And is there an email program that will handle huge quantities of
> local
> > > stored mail without bogging down the way Tbird does?  (I want to
> > > avoid microsoft products if at all possible).
> >
> > I have somewhat over 1 gig in Pegasus Mail on a 1999-era P550, and it
> > works pretty well.
> >
> > However, when I switched home ISPs I migrated to Google Mail, which
> > has a trainable spam filter and handles it so much better than the
> > Outlook Web Access we now have at work I use Google for that also.
> >
> > I have a separate Gmail account for use on my site, and it catches
> > hundreds of junk messages per day with few errors.
> >
> > --
> > Bob Sullivan
> > Schenectady Digital History Archive
> > <http://www.schenectadyhistory.org/>
> > Schenectady County (NY) Public Library
> > _______________________________________________
> > Web4lib mailing list
> > Web4lib at webjunction.org
> > http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/
> >
>
>
> --
> ************************************
> Maurice York
> Team Leader, Circulation and Reserves
> Woodruff Library
> Emory University
> Atlanta, GA 30322
> mcyork at emory.edu
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