Changing Emails

I’ve moved a lot of my email back to my personal account. My email is now michael@runcieman.com. I’ve setup scripts so that if I drop an email into a folder, every email from that address will go to that folder in the future. The scripts will re-generate a number of sieve filters based on the list of addresses in each folder every 30 minutes (or however often I want). This way if I want to remove a particular address from that ruleset, I just need to remove all the emails from that sender from that folder and that address will be removed. I’m not entirely sure sure if I’ll keep this setup or not, but it’s been a fun experiment.

I’ve been a Gmail user for years, over a decade actually, and it’s fine. But I find I don’t use it any different from a regular hosted email service. I rarely use the Gmail interface, search on my Mac or iPhone allow me to find what I’m looking for, so there isn’t a whole lot of incentive to stick with Gmail any longer. While on the other hand, Gmail’s IMAP interface has always been problematic and slow, filtering in Gmail is a pain, and Google is an advertising company. That last one doesn’t bother me too much at the moment, but I’ve noticed it’s been irking me more and more. I’m pretty sure one day Google will say “IMAP is no longer supported for Gmail” because they’ll want all their users going to their interface in order to serve ads. And that’s fine, I just want a bit more control.

Now some people will say that Gmail has the best spam filtering. That may be true, but there are options out there to deal with spam. Spamassassin has worked well for me the past, and services like Mailroute, which sits in front of your mail server and filters out spam, are available for a nominal monthly fee. 

Anyway, all this is to say, I’m reclaiming my email and so far I’m liking how it’s going.