Switch to gmail from POP3 (Outlook)

A few months after I switched from POP3 mail to gmail, I wrote an article “Gmail – what, why and how“.

Two years has passed since then, I’d like to share more thoughts of this switch.

Is gmail good at organizing email?

My answer to this question is “yes”.

Similar to many other business owners, I receive several hundreds of emails a day. Many of them are spam. Some are information emails I signed up for. The rest are important communication messages with other people.

Back when I was using Outlook to manage my email accounts, I had to create folders and sub folders to organize these emails. I usually try to “folder” emails right away but still find them piled up in my inbox. Every now and then, I needed to spend a couple of hours to go through the inbox and put “emails” away.

After I switched to gmail, I had never “folder”ed emails again. First of all, emails and replies and forwards are automatically grouped together. Secondly, “search” works so well … by punching in the project name and sender’s name in the email search box, I can pretty much always find what I look for.

What else do I like about gmail?

Labels: For emails that I might need to refer back often (typically things like proposals, price quotations, accounts information to various sites and services I signed up for), I would put a label to them. I only created a few specific labels and only use labels sparsely. This way, “labeling” doesn’t becomes a burden.

Star: It had become a habit to put a “star” to any email that I had read and still need to act to it … either to send a reply, or to complete a related task, or to make a phone call. After the action is done, I click to remove the star. At the end of the day, I would go through my “star” list to see if there is to-do item that is still open.

Easy to Access: I can access all new and old emails from any computer with Internet access. It’s very convenient when I need to look up a password at a client office. Before with POP3, to save space, I had configured all emails to be removed from server after they get downloaded. So even with web mail access to server, more often than not, older information I was looking for wouldn’t be there.

Anything I don’t like?

Not really.

There were a few things that I needed to get used to. One of them was that emails and replies were grouped together. So I need to pay close attention to the boldness of the subject line in the listing to see if there is new replies. But overall, the transition was very smooth. I fell in love with gmail right away and I still love it after two years of usage.

Is space (going to be) a problem?

Space allocation to each gmail account is increasing constantly but it can still be used up. I am currently at 70% mark (I used 5M out of my 7.3M space).  So I may choose to purge some older emails. Or, I will simply set up another gmail account and forward my business email accounts (lin@newcircleconsultin.com, etc.) to the new gmail account.  The good thing is that I had always been using lin@newcircleconsulting.com so my switch to another gmail account will be transparent to my clients.