A large part of my day is spent checking and answering e-mails, I suppose in an average day I probably get about 50 genuine messages and maybe 3,000 spam mails! Yes you read right, about 3,000! However e-mail is so time consuming for me for more than just the spam reason, I work in 2 locations, I have a home setup and an office that I work from most days. This can make managing my multiple e-mail accounts a real pain, especially as I like to use Outlook and GMail (Gmail has the most effective spam filters for any free e-mail account I’ve found to date, and I’ve tried a lot).
Up until the last few days I accessed my primary work e-mail from the office using Outlook and used the GMail web interface when I was out of the office. Of course this means that I have to go through and mark-as-read messages that I’ve already dealt with. This is all just a long winded way of saying that POP3 is rubbish if you work from multiple locations or work stations. Google have just answered my prayers though, GMail are to become the first free mail system to roll out FREE IMAP SUPPORT. This is huge, it’s bigger than huge, it’s immense. IMAP allows your e-mail account to be fully synchronised automatically, reply from your mobile and it’s there in your outlook, delete something in outlook and it’s removed from the webmail interface. To mobile professionals or just people that only like to do something once this is an epic step forward in free email.
The scary thing is I have no idea how they can do it. The problem with IMAP is that you have to maintain a connection to the server in order to synchronise, this causes heavy strain on the server and limits the number of users you can have. How Google have scaled this with the millions of GMail users out there I don’t know, if it works it’s going to save me probably 25% of my daily e-mail time so I don’t care. The question is now what to do with all that extra time?
5 Responses to “Save Time And Money With Better Email, GMail Introduce IMAP”
Erik Karey
October 31, 2007
IMAP for gmail is great because we can finally use our own mail clients. I’m so glad they did this!
|Paul B
October 31, 2007
They’ve had POP3 access for years now which works fine, if that’s your thing!
|Koen
November 1, 2007
Well…. they have more then 400,000-500,000 servers… Maybe even more. It’s of course difficult to scale, but they have the server power needed for it.
I personally don’t use Gmail a lot, and don’t give that e-mail to persons, mainly because it always online gets spam. I use .Mac mail (and no Paul, I’m not that stupid that I buy software that is for Windows, and then bother the developer with it. Don’t worry.)
What you can do with your free time? Relax, take it easy. Or create another site? Or script, or or… whatever. Indeed, there are a lot of things you can do.
|jackbravo
November 1, 2007
Actually…with all this extra time, maybe you can help me get my feet wet with PPC – perhaps I’d share profits?
|Paul B
November 2, 2007
The key to making money with PPC is attracting lots of organic search traffic, have you got a site in mind that you want help with?
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