Over the years I have had many email address from different ISPs, employers I’ve worked for, businesses I’ve started and for personal branding. Being online since 1996 I have collected and created a huge archive of emails; over 30,000 which was clogging up over 30GB of data on my HDD even though I had moved many years worth from to backup DVDs and external HDDs.
I recently started working with a new client (@wingdude) who outlined the way he preferred to work with consultants. Amongst other things he stated he ‘lived in GMail’ and had over 10 years of emails sitting in Google’s cloud. Google offer many fantastic free services of which GMail is but one. Google Apps is a brilliant and free solution for small to medium enterprise who need to offer email to staff without having to pay for email hosting. There is also a document creation and management function, calendar function and website construction interface. I use it for one of my businesses (@nextbigthing.com.au) , am about to deploy it for another business (@misterbig.com.au) and implemented it for one of my personal branding domains (@craigashleyrussell.com).
When Google first launched GMail it was through an invite only mechanism. Very wise considering in those days there was no such thing as cloud computing so the addition of users had to be managed carefully to avoid server failure at a massive scale. Originally, each invitee was given 10 invites for their friends. These found there way onto message boards and even eBay where they sold for a ten to twenty dollars. Now anyone can join without an invite and get about 7GB of storage, which grows all the time (you can actually watch your memory allocation grow, kilobyte by kilobyte), and Google’s amazing search interface for your own mailbox. That means you never have to delete emails ever again as the memory continues to grow. And it’s spam filter is the ultimate; I get no spam. Plus all this costs me nothing. $0!
I liked the idea of cleaning 30GB off my HDD and taking advantage of GMail’s advanced tools so I started to plan the best way to go about it. After all, moving 30GB to the cloud meant using 30GB of bandwidth at least. So these are the steps I took before sending a single email.
Migrate all my emails into one place – my Apple Mail app
Run de-duping software to ensure that I was not uploading any double-ups.
Delete any emails I was 101% sure would never need again; e-newsletters etc
Move all hese emails to the Inbox or Sent Mail box – all other mailboxes and Smart mailboxes had been condensed
Set-up my GMail account. This was interesting because I had several already; my very first crashrus@gmail and, for personal branding, craigashleyrussell@gmail. I decided to make crashrus@gmail the master account. It was my login to Google analytics, YouTube and several other of their platforms. In short, that login had a ‘history’ with Google that could be useful down the track remembering that one of Google’s search criteria is history.
Next I turned on the IMAP feature for my GMail account. IMAP essentially keeps a mail client and email web server in sync with each other. I have always found this very handy especially as when an email is marked as read on one device it is automatically marked as read on every other device or web server where that IMAP account resides (online, laptops, stand alones, iPhones etc). An email which is sent from one device appears in every other device too. Well not really, but a version of it does. The server houses the email in reality.
That’s it. All my emails from many different accounts are now living in Goggle’s cloud, available to me any time via my choice of device.
When I send an email it goes from the account that received it. I can create signatures for each address but the real bonus os Google search. I’ve had instances where looking back at 5 year old emails has made a big difference.
And migrating to GMail has made a big difference to me.