Ok, so I know they had a well publicized outage last week, but I finally converted my company over to the free version of google apps.  Shared calendar, great email with awesome spam protection, and it’s free.  We’re not an internet company, so having a nice partner like google to “get our back” on a mission critical service (as opposed to paying a ton for it with perhaps not even as much reliability) was a great deal.

 Love it.  Google rocks.

Man, I hate spam.  I have an email address that I’ve had for more than ten years, and I would say that 99% of all the email I receive is spam (maybe more).  Of course, I have some programs for filtering out spam, and I have tried them all – white lists, black lists, bayesian, you name it. 

None of them work to my satisfaction.

So, I was dabbling with some of the settings on my gmail account the other day and was musing – “Wouldn’t it be great if google offered their spam filtering technology as an add-on to Thunderbird or even Outlook?”  Realizing the latter would likely never happen, it came to me – google lets me use gmail to check other accounts, and allows POP/IMAP access, so in fact you can use it to filter email, just not the way I thought.

So, I setup google to check my main email account, then setup Thunderbird to check google.  WHAM-O!  I’m in.  What’s even cooler is I can use gmail when I am on the road to check my email account, and not worry about syncing email between my home client and some other account, etc.  I love it!

 Things got a bit squirrely trying to get the authentication setup (you’ve switched over to having google check your account, then they send a verficiation email, and you have to respond to it – but where?  in google?  in your old client?).  Anyway, after getting through that I haven’t received ONE SPAM in days.  Amazing.  And since gmail can check up to five accounts, I have been able to centralize all of my accounts now into one account, it’s super cool.

 Thanks google, you rock!