Since 1999, I've used an mvps.org e-mail address as my primary method of personal communication; several months ago, the wonderful folks who run mvps.org (free!) for the MVP community had some issues, and made some changes to their policies. This led me to try an alternative approach - I started having Gmail fetch all messages from my mvps.org account.
After spending some time trying to adjust to Gmail's interface, and having difficulties with the un-sortability of e-mail in Gmail (I know, I know, Google's theory is that you can just search for messages, but frankly that just wasn't working for me), I set up Outlook to download my mail from Gmail using POP, while also leaving my email in Gmail, just in case. This lets me happily sort my mail (and Oh! I love to sort it, and I love the various views I can create, and I love Search Folders too!).
The good news about Gmail is that they really have removed a lot of the spam I was seeing -- for the past 30 days, I have over 6,000 messages in Gmail's spam folder - when I was using my mvps.org account without filtering the messages through Gmail, Outlook's junk mail rules took care of most of the spam, but I still needed to manually clear out messages, and I was in the habit of doing so every few days. With Gmail, because I rarely look at the web interface and rely on Outlook as my client, I wasn't looking in my spam folder. Bad idea for me, because apparently Gmail thinks that, among others, my husband's cousin, who's in China, and my MVP lead, who has a Microsoft address, are lousy spammers. And they're not, they're lovely people! Now I'm looking at going through all 6K spam messages to see who else has been mis-identified as a spammer. Sigh.
Other gripes about Gmail's online interface:
- I'm really used to having inline spell and grammar checking. I don't make tons of errors, but I do make them. Outlook lets me know this on the fly, with Gmail I have to think about it.
- I can't make folders. See my comment on search above. I LOVE folders and don't think search is adequate.
- Why oh why can't I flag a message with a reminder?? Stupid stars just aren't enough of a visual cue for me.
- I want a preview pane. The snippet of the message is helpful, but a reading pane is so much more useful
I do like the way Gmail handles conversations, and wish that Outlook was better in the conversation view; I've found it to be unreliable in the past.
Oh, and someone else named Missy apparently thinks that my Gmail address is actually her Gmail address. It isn't. Her friends send me cute jokes at times, but I've also gotten messages with business information that I KNOW I shouldn't have seen. If you're the other Missy, please sort out what your real Gmail address is, because I get enough mail as it is! (Why can't the messages from her friends be flagged as spam, instead of those from my friends??)