Folks, I recently suffered a few events which are hinting that perhaps I should move from using a desktop mail client (Outlook 2007 in my case) to web mail such as Google Mail. Yesterday morning my pst file was corrupted and I wasted 45 minutes finding scanpst.exe (I forgot it's name) and running it over my 200MB file. Luckily it came good. Over the last few months I've helped friends migrate to new machines, and in each case the worst thing was the mail. One person didn't have a mail client on Win7, another blew the size when migrating from Outlook Express to Outlook, another had a pst that wouldn't export. This suffering would have not happened if these people had web mail accounts.
I had a look at Google mail and I can see that there is a feature to "add account" and it will poll my existing pop3 accounts. This leaves me wondering about the following issues: . Security - How secure is Google mail? I have no idea how Google isolate or handle user's email. Where is it? Who can access it? Is it encrypted? And so on... (maybe it's in their sign-up fine print) . Import - Can I import my pst into Google mail? A quick web search hints that it's possible. . Persistence - Can I be sure that my web mail will remain accessible to me? Lord forbid that Google goes broke or drops it's web mail service. . Search - Outlook has a pretty good search facility, so how good is the Google mail one? . Advertising - Targeted ads to me ... Yeechhh! As if I don't get enough already on bus stops, TV, radio, food packets, web pages, sky writing, highway billboards, etc. These are the first issues that popped into my head. Has anyone else made the move to Google mail for serious use and found it okay? Any things to beware of? Perhaps there are competitors to Google mail I haven't considered? I actually have a Google email account, but it's barely been used ever. Greg
