Recently, I switched all of my “public” email use to a Gmail account: legion28@gmail.com.

I had used Gmail before, but only as a throwaway email account. I had continued to use my own (economyofeffort.com) email accounts for my public mail. I used the IMAP server to allow me to access mail from different computers, using Thunderbird. Problem was, the spam filtering isn’t as good if you’re marking spam on differing Thunderbird installs (because each only sees a portion of your junk mail marks, so there’s a lot of emails that are spam that would’ve been filtered out on other computers). Plus, I have long held to the superiority of a true email client versus web-based mail.

But after watching a number of people at the Austin Game Conference use Gmail for their mail, I decided it was time to make my public email go through Gmail.

And frankly, it’s great. It is much snappier than accessing my mail over the IMAP server, especially when dealing with large volumes of mail. And the junk mail filter works beautifully without me needing to train it (or re-train it if I’m using a Thunderbird on a different computer, or a different OS on the same computer, etc).

My parents still use Hotmail for their email. I will switch them over soon.