When I bought my first domain all those years ago I was so excited, I finally had a cool email address, not a hotmail one which was all I really knew about back then. I went around signing up to exciting things with my snazzy new email address until one day, the server went down - I didn’t get a single email for days, I felt so isolated! The server came back up but as it had been several days the backup mail servers had returned the emails to senders.
Since then everytime I sign up to something or someone asks for my email I give them my gmail one, why? Put simply, its more reliable. (I’ve always commented on blogs with my domain email though - for consistancy)
There are arguments for and agaist domain email, heres just a few important points.
- It looks more professional
- Its personalised
- Can’t be accessed world wide (well it can but see next point!)
- Face it - webmail is ugly
- You can use it with thunderbird but theres always the risk of losing all your emails
- You’re relying on your server to stay up and running
- Spam protection is limited
I use gmail for all my emails. Their dedicated to emails - although you get the odd bit of downtime for maintenance etc, they constantly backup their service and its their job to provide email to people so their going to be good at it and they are good at it!
I currently have 7 email accounts and its not at all confusing. Their all on different domains but I manage them though one interface, gmail. I can access it world wide, it always looks the same, each account is seperate and I can send emails as each of those 7 addresses without having to login to another site.
First you need a gmail account - I think virtually everyone does any way - comment with your email address if you want an invite although I think you can sign up on your own now…there have been rumours.
If your using domain email set up a forwarder to your gmail address! edit I’d forgotten about this bit! /edit
Go to settings > accounts and click ‘add another email account’ it’ll send an email to that account and give you a verification code. Type that code into the pop up box and you now control that email account through google! Be sure to select "Reply from the same address the message was sent to." Otherwise it’ll get confusing!
Next thing you need to do is create a label for your email account. Click on labels and call it whatever you want and the click on filters. Create a new filter with the following properties leaving other boxes blank. To: youremailaddress or @yourdomain.com to catch them all, then click next, tick ‘Archive it’ and ‘apply the label’, selecting which label you want applied.
All you need to do now is spam yourself silly to test! Speaking of spam - you’ll never get any again thanks to gmails excellent spam filters! The Gmail Manager plugin is the perfect accessory to this setup, make sure you tell it to check the labels though!
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[tags]domain, email, server, gmail, spam, tutorial[/tags]
August 13, 2007
Posted in 
11:11 am
Thanks Han. :) But I encountered one little ‘mishap.’ How would I delete the mail off the server? Of course, if you have too many email accounts, it’d be hard to log into your webmail account on each, so I figured this out (sorry if this was in your post 
But If I have one, I think I will continue to use my e-mail now because it will be too much trouble to make another e-mail. I also do not like to check so many e-mails.
eruanna.net is the blog of a multimedia technology student in the UK. Her name is Han. Shes very fond of the third person. She loves making 
Yeah Gmail is great, I’ve always done that; except I never ticked that “Reply From Same Address Mail Was Sent To” - so you’re right; it did get pretty confusing, but I’m guessing more-so for the people emailing me! I’ll have to try adding some filters too from the different addresses.
How is this in-text advertising going? Pretty cool idea!