More About Email Accounts

As long as I started talking through my thoughts about email accounts, I thought I should continue the conversation. Gmail's current size limitation bothers me. It bothers me a lot (at work, I would fill their 7.5 gb limit in a couple weeks - in my personal life, maybe a year or two). However, Gmail is exceptionally powerful (and cool), so I have a couple ideas how this could work.

First, using filters to forward mail in Gmail is awesome. I can set up Gmail so that when my wife sends an email to my Gmail account, not only do I get it on Gmail, but I also get a copy automatically saved to my "Wife" folder in Yahoo. This email that goes to Yahoo doesn't look like a forward, it comes to Yahoo just like it was sent from my wife. This actually solves my main issue - I want to collect a lifetime of our emails that we exchange in one location (we email each other a LOT). In thirty years, I don't want to have our emails spread out over a dozen different email accounts.

Second, while I really hate this idea, I may start using my Gmail account for personal email and my Yahoo account for everything else. I would like to keep my email centralized, but (1) Yahoo doesn't work well on a Blackberry and (2) Gmail doesn't provide enough space for me to store everything there. Thus, using either of those options as my sole email account doesn't work well. Maybe Gmail will catch up with their competition and offer unlimited space in the future. Or, maybe Gmail will continue to use their space limitation as a revenue generator as they rent additional space for a fee (frankly, that's what I would do if I were Google).

Third (a combination of my first two points), an idea that I'm toying with is using my Gmail account for personal email, but then setting up a filter for each person so that when they send me emails at Gmail, I automatically get a copy at my Yahoo address for archiving. But that's a lot of work. And I'm not sure if I really I really need to archive everything I get to a second email account.

Fourth (another combination), the reason I will eventually run out of space on Gmail is due to attachments. If I set up a filter in Gmail to forward any email with an attachment to my Yahoo account, and then delete the Gmail copy of the message after I read it, then I will probably never run out of room in Gmail.

Fifth, I could probably live with 7.5 gb of email space if I stopped archiving absolutely everything and didn't email myself all of my important files for storage. Of course, there's a good chance that I will want to check what coupons Dairy Queen sent me a decade ago and I like having my important files saved nicely in my email account.

Sixth, I make everything way too complicated.