Welcome to the 21st century Greg :P Security - From memory, it's possible for presumeably select google employees to see your email. I recall a new article about an employee who got in trouble for doing so. I suspect they take it seriously as they now get audited every two years for privacy practices.
Import - *shrug* never done it. Persistence - You can't be certain your mail will remain accessible with any web mail. How many people was it that randomly lost their gmail accounts not long ago? My solution is to do both. I use thunderbird at home purely as a mail archive. Every now and then I start it up and download mail from gmail. Thunderbird is in effect my mail backup. Otherwise, I use gmail exclusively. Search - gmails search is about as good as it gets. If I have the slightest recollection of some email I think I got ages ago, I can find it in seconds. Advertising - There's advertising? I don't even notice. You can even get plugins to supress them :) Competitors - I dislike hotmail/live. That's the only other one I've used significantly. David "If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... checkmate!" -Zapp Brannigan, Futurama On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 16:21, Greg Keogh <[email protected]> wrote: > 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
