Living life spam free (finally)

I got the point with spam where i was spending probably close to 20 minutes a day sifting through my junk mail box to make sure nothing important was deleted. I have about 10 different email addresses that are publicly posted on the various websites i’m involved in. The spiders of course sucked them all up and added me to the millions of Viagra^® spambots. Thanks Viagra, but I’m 23 – i’ll get back to you later…

The solution I came up with was the filter all my email through GMail. You can add up to 5 POP3 accounts which GMail will download to your account and label them however you like. Sending email is simple too – any mail you reply to will be sent using whatever address the sender used. GoogleSystem blog covered this method a year ago when it was still Beta.

GMail also recently added IMAP support – allowing synchronous management of email across various clients. The reason this is nice for me is that I use my desktop at the office and then use my laptop on the road or at home. I now have identical contact lists, inboxes and sent folders, whether I’m at work, home, or on someone elses computer using GMail through the web browser.

Here’s an example of using IMAP with the IPhone.

Thank you Google. You just gave me 608.3 hours of my life back over the next 5 years.