Change is in the air

I've been playing around with Gmail.

I think I like it.

I have a couple of virtual E-mail addresses associated with our business websites (CostaRicaQuilts.com and CostaRicaLandSurveys.com), but since they're both hosted through Yahoo, all the mail actually gets funneled into one place - the same E-mail address I've had for almost ever.

Gmail is looking like a much more effective way of managing these multiple addresses - for instance, when someone sends me an E-mail with information about a quilt retreat, but also includes a recipe and a photo of their kid.

Where do you file that?

Gmail doesn't file things in folders at all. Instead, I assign a label - or several - to any given E-mail, so if I'm looking for retreat info, it'll come up when I pull the "Quilt Retreats" label. And if I'm looking for a photo, it'll come up under "Photos" or whatever.

And how about when people reply to your E-mail but don't include the text of your message to them? Digging through the "Sent Mail" box is very seriously for the birds. How have we all put up with that for so long?? Gmail keeps the back & forth messages all together. I wholeheartedly approve.

So. We'll see. It's not entirely bug-free, and I will certainly not be giving up the old address, but I think I'm going to shift the bulk of my attention over to the wave of the future. At the moment, the Gmail account is set up to check the Yahoo one automatically so I still get everything that's sent there, although it only checks a few times a day, as opposed to, you know, obsessively. (Don't worry. I'm still obsessing. Just on the new account, you see.) And I still have to go into Yahoo and shovel out the spam every day or two. Maybe one of these days I'll unleash that unholy storm onto Gmail and see how well it gets filtered.

Anyway. The name's richly. Coastingrichly. And you can find me at Gmail.com.