I’ve been a little too busy to check out the new POP function in Gmail until this morning.
If you’ve been reading the last few posts, you can see by now why Google’s free email service has swept me off my feet. It makes my email easier to manage, and I can do it all from one tab in Mozilla Firefox, instead of needing to have an entire other application open.
Now I can be in two places (or more) at once – at one of my sites and in my email, tabbing between two windows. Instead of separating the two tasks, I do both side by side, and have some other applications open that I might find more useful, like Dreamweaver, or Media Player and Photoshop. Gone are the days where I might have to close something down to check my email with Microsoft Outlook, or run its lesser cousin Outlook Express in the background.
My only problem with Gmail has been more of my own issue than anything else – I’m a pack rat.
I want to keep everything I might find remotely useful one day, even if it’s only on a disk somewhere that I’ve filed away. And with Google Gmail’s search function, if I keep something, and later lose it, I can always Google my own mail to find it again, then apply a filter to it so I’ll never lose it again. (Filters are kind of like folders).
I had commented on another blog about a month to six weeks ago that it would be neat if I could download Gmail, swearing in posts here that I’d gladly pay for a POP version of Gmail. That way, I’d be able to backup and clean out my email periodially – I get a lot of reference emails, hundreds of emails a day that I don’t have to answer or read daily, but are handy for research, things like Google news alerts and email newsletters.
(I typically don’t read ezines in the conventional way anymore – I read RSS Feeds and/or blogs. When you’re constantly researching, dispensing and applying information, it’s much faster.and I get the best news first.
Instead of skimming each one, I mark the ones that have headlines that look interesting for down-time reading, and archive the rest of them into a folder. Then once a month, I do random search queries on my Gmail for things I’m interested in like “sales tools”, “conversion rate” or “free download”.
Then I just read the emails that have my keywords. )
Now, lo and behold, there’s POP Gmail. I decided to try it this morning – if it works the way it’s supposed to, I don’t see myself going back to any other way of managing my email. I would gladly pay $20 a month – almost as much as dial-up internet access – to use it. But lucky for me, it’s free.
So this morning, I decided to use Gmail’s auto-configuration tool for to set up my Gmail, after changing the POP settings in my Gmail account to accomodate the change.
I had less than desireable results, so I’m going to retweak my settings and try again, or set it up manually. For some reason, even though I set up all my Gmail to be downloaded, it only pushed my first 332 emails from June, though it looks like it is downloading July upon a second request.
Gmail’s been so good to me that I’m hardly upset. It may have something to do with how my filters are set up, but right now I’m just so elated at the possibility that I can’t even complain.
Because if I can get this to work the way I would like it to, for me, it’s the equivalent of email freedom. One highly configurable, organized point of communication, forever and ever, amen…
