This post could rapidly turn into a massive digressionary polemic and I have no time, so let me expel this bit of brain flatulence:
My first Google registration was for Gmail in its earliest beta incarnation (back in the day when people sold invites on eBay, got mine from Jim Forbes). I used it to set up a spam catcher — an anonymous address for those times when I didn’t want to part with my personal addresses in online registration forms. Other Google products used that mail address — Google News, Google Reader, iGoogle, even the mobile suite of Google apps on my Blackberry — and as they gradually took over more of my screen time they gradually became more important, enough so that were it not for corporate enterprise demands like Lotus Notes, I would probably run my life through Google.
Doing so under a registration designed to trap erectile dysfunction spam was becoming an issue. I had to transition to a sensible account such as david.churbuck, not sexypapa123 ….
The transition has not been pretty, but the promise — especially if I can create a parallel computing environment that compliments Lenovo’s (cross calendar conflict resolution, email forwarding) — is very compelling.
So, surprising how a personal beta of a beta product turns into a headache after two years because I considered it too experimental to run under my primary identity.
This is exactly the sort of “personal IT” that drives corporate CIOs nuts. As someone who is trapped in corporate IT hell, I fully support it.
Dave…I’ve been thinking about doing this same thing. I started using gmail for exactly the same reason you did. Would be great if google had a function that yahoo is talking about … noticing good patterns in your emails … especially people you frequently respond to, or legit alerts or monthly things you have coming in … then just auto-whipe/block everything else and slowly begin to allow back in stuff you lost or missed.
Sounds like it is worth it though, I will try it out.