I’ve been using Gmail for what seems like ages now. I believe I had to find an invite for it when it first came online even. I kept my own mail server for personal mail though. I ran this mail server myself, owned the domain and everything. A few months ago, I got into a consolidation mode/mood and decided to try sending gmail over to my mail server to check mail, giving me all my mail in one location.
A bit of getting used to. Some labelling took care of most issues though it just wasn’t “what I was used to”. After a week or so, I realize Google spam filter was way better than my own spamassassin setup, which was wonderful. I was manually deleting a dozen spam a day and trying to get spamassassin to learn better, but it was just too much. Google got rid of it all.
I then realized that I wasn’t spending any time at all managing my mail server or my mail folder. No deleting spam, no sorting, no emptying trash, nothing. Then it occurred to me, google isn’t doing that either. I loaded up Thunderbird and logged into my server. I had to download thousands of messages that hadn’t been gathered since I started the gmail process. Of course, I had specified in the gmail setup to leave mail on the server as I was just testing things out. What annoyed me a bit was that it didn’t appear to delete anything on the mail server, even the mail that I had deleted within gmail.
But, all is pretty good regardless. My personal mail server actually has a few accounts on it, all funnelled into one inbox, which is then checked by gmail. I’m able to set aliases up so I can respond right in gmail using any of those email addresses. Guess I should just take the next step and set it to delete mail from the server and be done with it.