A while back I read Scott Mitchell's post, Another Great Use for Gmail, about filtering all of your e-mail through your Gmail account.  Most do it for the SPAM filtering or archiving but I've got one more - disk space.  The reason I decided to give this a try was to keep all of my personal e-mail together, easier to find with search and labels, and take advantage of the storage space that Google gives you.

I blogged last year about the great guys I use for my e-mail service provider.  They are still great but there are a couple of things that I'm now looking to Google for.  First, my provider's webmail interface is either IlohaMail or SquirrelMail...ick.  Don't get me wrong, the functionality of basic e-mail is there and works good but that's about it.  Second, I have limited space to support my accounts plus a few others.  Everyone else removes their messages from the server as they are downloaded to Outlook but I leave mine on the server so I can have access to them from the web.  If I don't keep up on deleting messages I'll eventually use up all of the space in just a few days.

Now, I forward everything to my Gmail account.  When a message hits Gmail it's archived and a label is attached to it.  I enabled POP access to my GMail account so I can get my personal e-mail delivered to my Outlook inbox like normal...and still have a copy online and I don't have to remember to delete it to save space.  All is good for now and hopefully it will keep up.

Note:

In writing this post last night I went looking for trackback links etc.  In doing that I see that Scott wrote an update to his previous post, A Neat Idea, but a Poor Implementation.  He is using rules within Outlook to forward his mail while I'm actually doing it at the server level and avoiding those issues.  He mentioned doing this as well and I think this is the best approach.    I've actually disabled downloading e-mail from my primary POP server so the only mail that is downloaded to Outlook comes through GMail.