A while ago, I was chatting via email with my pal Mike when he mentioned that he had all of his personal email forwarding to his Gmail account. At first I didn’t really see the point, but then I started to think about this scenario. Moments later, I setup all of my personal email to forward to my Gmail account as well. I’m pretty sure Mike uses this setup for the same reason that I do. Here’s why:

Google has been generous enough to provide over 2GB of free email storage, on what is probably very fault tolerant hardware, distributed over multiple colocations with mass amounts of bandwidth…much better than the setup my hosted email and websites are running on. By setting up my mail alias to direct mail simultaneously to both my personal and Gmail accounts, I effectively have a very nice instant email archive. It will take quite a while to fill 2 gigs of storage space so I can pretty much leave the Gmail account alone and use it in the event that my cheapo webhost inexplicably loses all of my email history. It’s not the most elegant solution, but it get’s my “thumbs up” because it’s quick, easy, and FREE!